cking's Full Review: David Sedaris - Me Talk Pretty One Day
I was first introduced to David Sedaris five or so years ago when his hilarious “SantaLand Diaries” were broadcast on NPR’s Morning Edition. In them, Sedaris tells of his depressing job as one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s one poverty-stricken Christmas. In the Diaries, Sedaris detailed all the absurdity one might expect from such a job, with a particular eye for the bizarre.
His Santaland success lead to frequent appearances on PRI’s “This American Life” (if you don’t know this program, head over to www.thislife.org and have some realaudio fun) and two books: Barrel Fever and Naked. The pieces in both books are mostly autobiographical, but one hopes they are not anyone’s real autobiography. They are just too strange. One, “A Plague of Tics” describes a childhood battle with OCD in a way that is painfully sad but makes us laugh anyway. Or makes me laugh, anyway. Then again, I’m one of those oddballs who finds Flannery O’Connor funny. Kafka can usually get at least a chuckle from me too.
Sedaris can take a relatively tame situation and spin out of control in a very funny way. In Naked, he describes being bitten by the drama bug. One day, all of his locution becomes painfully mock Shakespearean. At dinner, he couldn’t say “Mom, the chicken’s great.” It had to be
Methinks, kind sir, most gentle lady, fellow siblings all, that this barnyard fowl be most tasty and succulent, having simmered in its own sweet juices for such a time as it might take the sun to pass, rosy and full-fingered, across the plum-colored sky for the course of a twilight hour. ‘Tis crisp yet juicy, this plump bird, satisfied in the company of such finely roasted neighbors. Hear me out, fine relations, and heed my words, for methinks it adventurous, and fanciful, too, to saddle mine fork with both fowl and carrot at the exact same time, the twin juices blending together in a delicate harmony which doth cajole and enliven mine tongue in a spirit of unbridled merriment! What say ye, fine father, sisters and infant brother, too, that we raise our flagons high in celebration of this hearty feast, prepared lovingly and with utmost grace by this dutiful woman we have the good fortune to address as wife, wench and mother!
Me Talk Pretty One Day is Sedaris’ latest and by far most polished work. He now has a regular gig at some magazine I don’t read like GQ or Vanity Fair—I forget which—and it really shows. His earlier pieces did tend to ramble and go in some very unexpected directions. This could be a good thing, but it wasn’t always. His new magazine editors have imposed some strict word limits and have made Sedaris sacrifice some of the deeply odd writing that have made him a distinctive but strange voice and forced him to concentrate on the funny stuff. This is not entirely bad. If there are fewer moments where you wonder if the author is having you on, there are more moments when you are laughing.
Sedaris has a way with the small detail and the well-turned phrase. In one piece, suspecting that he is actually a genius, he takes an IQ test. The results are not encouraging. Or as he puts it, “were my number translated into dollars, it would buy you about three buckets of chicken.” His boyfriend tries to console him by telling him that he is good at lots of things. “When asked for some examples, he listed vacuuming and naming stuffed animals.”
For the past few years, Sedaris has been living in France, and the finest writing in this book relates his negotiations of French life and culture. Last year, I got to hear him read from his new book before it was published. He read a story from Forgive me for quoting at length here. I’m NOT review padding, I swear! I just find this dialogue too funny not to give you all of it. He is really getting a lot of mileage from translating atrocious, mangled French.
In a rudiments of French class (he didn’t bother learning any French before moving), while reviewing French holidays, a Muslim woman fresh from North Africa asks what Easter is. The class members take turns trying to explain.
”It is,” said one, “a party for the little boy of God who call his self Jesus and…oh, s h i t.” She faltered and her fellow countryman came to her aid.
“He fall his self Jesus and then he be die one day on two…morsels of…lumber.”
The rest of the class jumped in, offering bits of information that would have given the pope an aneurysm.
“He die one day and then he go above of my head to live with your father.”
“He weared of himself the long hair and after he die, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples.”
“He nice, the Jesus.”
“He make the good things and on the Easter we be sad because somebody makes him dead today.”
Later in the piece, he runs afoul of the competing traditions of who brings the chocolate. As the teacher explained it,
“Here in France the chocolate is brought by a big bell that flies in from Rome.”
I called for a time-out. “But how do the bell know where you live?”
“Well, “ she said, “How does a rabbit?”
It was a decent point, but at least a rabbit has eyes. That’s a start. Rabbits move from place to place, while most bells can only go back and forth—and they can’t even do that on their own power. On top of that, the Easter Bunny has character. He’s someone you’d like to meet and shake hands with. A bell has all the personality of a cast-iron skillet. It’s like saying that come Christmas, a magic dustpan flies in from the North Pole, led by eight flying cinder blocks. Who wants to stay up all night so they can see a bell? And why fly one in from Rome when they’ve got more bells than they know what to do with right here in Paris? That’s the most implausible aspect of the whole story, as there’s no way the bells of France would allow a foreign worker to fly in and take their jobs. That Roman bell would be lucky to get work cleaning up after a French bells’ dog—and even then he’d need papers. It just didn’t add up.
I could go on, but instead, I recommend you get Me Talk Pretty One Day. The laugh per page ratio is as high as anything I have read in recent memory.
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