David Sedaris (2004) Dress Your Family in Corduroy & Denim.

I’d not heard of David Sedaris. After reading this book, I know there’s been a film-version of his early life. I’ve not seen it. I understand he’s a humourist (perhaps I should use the American spelling, humorist). He’s meant to be funny.

Book sales are heavily influenced by the book cover. The book cover here is nothing to look at. I notice these things more than your average non-humourist because I’ve skin in the great game. This screams non-descript. Two peacocks on a branch, one foregrounded. It doesn’t sell, sell, sell. I’m not sure what it’s supposed to mean. What grabbed me was the quote on the book cover, which made me pick it up. The Guardian: ‘Unquestionably, the king of comic writing’.

Ha, Ha?  

I read every day. Humour has many faces. Sedaris goes for the world-weary gay man. He has seen how ridiculous life is and is reporting back his findings. For humour to work, it must resonate with the reader. He makes mum and dad and his sisters and brother part of his act. They’re all stand-in and stand-up in real life.  

The secret of great writing is you’ve got to love your characters. Clearly Sedaris does. In ‘Baby Einstein,’ for example, the narrator is Sedaris as a boy.

‘My mother and I were on the beach, rubbing oil into each other’s backs and guessing who in the family would be the first to have children.’

David goes first. He guesses Liza. She’s fourteen, but his reasoning is based on her character traits.

This is straightforward conversational ping-pong.

She’s not necessarily maternal. But she likes to do things in the right order. This is the early seventies. Straight lines for straight sisters. Graduate from college, get married, have a baby.

His mother throws a curveball. ‘Gretchen,’ her second daughter, ‘will be first’.

‘It’s written on her hips.’

That’s beautiful writing (I’ve highlighted it, don’t shoot me) and intuitively logical.

‘It will be Gretchen, then Lisa, then Tiffany.’

‘What about Amy?’  

‘My mother thought for a moment. ‘Amy won’t have a child... Amy will have a monkey.’   

‘I did not include myself in the baby prophecy, as I couldn’t imagine a time when homosexuals, either through adoption or procurement of a rented womb, could create families of their own.’

That’s the authorial knowing aside. A movement from family to wider society. Sedaris is inviting the reader to laugh at him and with him, in his wry look at the way society is ordered. I don’t find it funny, but I like his tone.

‘Monie Changes Everything,’ has a sneaky look at class. His mother’s great aunt Mildred is loaded. She buys a new silver Cadillac every year, has a chauffeur and housekeeper. Her house is the biggest and best in a district where money matters. Aunt Mildred is Aunt Monie. His mother’s voice changes when she talks to Aunt Monie on the phone. His dad didn’t give Aunt Monie a tour of the house and show her the improvements he made that some other succour would have got someone else to do at ten times the cost. Aunt Monie was blood, but she expected deference and she didn’t need to pay for it. Her two deceased husbands had paid up front for her status. The Sedaris family tries to act themselves. But Monie Changes Everything.

‘Six to Eight Black Men’ looks at our notions of Christmas and gun laws. In Texas and Michigan, for example, he relates how blind people are allowed to hunt. In the former, they must have a sighted hunting companion. In Michigan, the blind hunter can go it alone. Sedaris asks how the blind hunter finds his/her way home?

He segues how guns aren’t really an issue in Europe (perhaps because we don’t have a gun lobby powerful enough to scare any incoming President to kow-tow to their corporate wishes and right-wing propaganda tied in with issues of personal liberty. And remember this book was published before the moron’s moron was elected President in 2016, when Trump made it mandatory for all blind people to carry a gun to defend themselves against migrants from in his words, ‘shitty countries’. Shoot first.)

Sedaris’s glib take is that in Holland the Dutch don’t have reindeers helping Santa deliver presents on Christmas, but six to eight black men. I didn’t know that. Don’t know if it’s true. This is one of those stories that doesn’t work because it isn’t really homespun. A play on words and ideas. Malapropisms. No feet on the ground, black or otherwise.

Nobody is perfect. Sedris’s snapshots want to show the joins. How we all have feet of clay. He largely succeeds. Read on.