Criticult.Com

I am new to the essayist/memoir field of writing so I'll admit to being (way) late to the Sedaris bandwagon. This is the third Sedaris book I've read, after Me Talk Pretty One Day and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and I would say it is my favorite. While not as consistently funny as Me Talk Pretty, I found the stories were more interesting and offered something more than just a humorous anecdote.

The emphasis is off the immediate family this time around and focuses more on David Sedaris' personal experiences, especially cross-country hitch-hiking when he was in his 20's. The standard family tales are still present; crazy Ya Ya lives with the family, Lisa gets her first period during the US OPEN, etc., but they have been de-emphasised a bit and this helps to open up the narrative and give it more depth and incite into Sedaris himself.

Of particular note are the hitch-hiking episodes. While played for humor it still didn't make me ever want to get into a stranger's car, I don't care how desperate for a ride I may be. Some of Sedaris' adventures very easily could have killed him, but he blasts past the really scary/creepy parts to get back to the humor and this makes the story feel a bit rushed, especially since we don't actually get to find out how he escaped some of these situations.

50 pages of the book are devoted to one essay called "C.O.G.", a title which doesn't makes sense until the final 20 pages. This monster chapter details Sedaris taking a bus to Oregon to work as an apple picker for the season. After the season is over he is offered a job in the factory that processes the apples and he takes it. There he befriends a co-worker and things go swimmingly until one night he returns to the guy's trailer after being invited for a drink and things get really scary really fast. But as uncomfortable and cringe worthy as the events the stories are always funny.

It takes a lot of skill to make cancer funny, but in the story "Ashes" Sedaris does a brilliant job of bringing both the humor and pathos to a cliched subject. He perfectly captures the helplessness of finding out someone close to you has cancer and how your behavior changes toward that person.

The book wraps up with the title essay, "Naked", in which our neurotic hero decides on a lark to visit a nudist camp (they don't call them colonies anymore). This story is probably my favorite of all the ones he has done. Uproariously funny, insightful, and just a blast to read, I found myself re-reading passages because my eyes were blurring from laughing so hard. It is the perfect capper to a book that is all about mining bad situations for their inherent comedy but sacrificing none of the integrity of the stories themselves.

Labels: Cannonball Read, TylerDFC