Cons: the three stories I didn't like, the book version of "The Smoking Section"
The Bottom Line: Sedaris's observations of the world and his place(s) in it make me smile and sometimes laugh out loud. (... and sometimes roll my eyes.)
Stephen_Murray's Full Review: David Sedaris - When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Sometimes I wonder about what many people find funny ("Napoleon Dynamite," for instance) -- and at what they don't find funny (the boldfaces lies of George W. Bush, for instance). It is reassuring that David Sedaris's unpretentious essays often make me laugh, so that there is some overlap between my sense of humor and that of masses of others'. I discovered just how popular Sedaris is when I showed up only an hour before his local bookstore appearance on his tour with his latest collection, When You Are Engulfed in Flames and found a place in line more than half a block from the door to the store.
Having first come to fame with his hilarious account of being employed as an elf in a New York Macy's Santaland, it is no secret that Sedaris is short. I could only occasionally catch glimpses of him while he read the R-rated "Town and Country." Given that he is a radio performer, hearing him read it was enough for me (standing in the back corner of the Van Ness Books, Inc.). I was on the side of the store on which the line for signings was designated. Had I known how slowly it would move, I wouldn't have waited. (Efficiency is impersonal and he talked a bit to everyone.)
The four (of the five that exist) previous Sedaris collections I read I read mostly on public transportation. I did not try to read them as books, though while waiting in line I paged through Me Talk Pretty Some Day, rereading all the passages I'd marked.
I tried to read When You Are Engulfed in Flames as a book, that is not to stop after reading an essay/story, and not to skip around, but to go onto the next one as if it were a chapter in some continuous narration. I couldn't. After two or at most three (and sometimes one), I quit. Thus, it took me a couple of months to read the whole book.
Or, I could say "reread" since I'd read almost all the stories (three appeared in other magazines) in the New Yorker one at a time -- including a much shorter (mercifully shorter!) version of the way-too-long "Smoking Section" about his quitting smoking that occupies the last 83 pages of the book. That one is not lacking in the usual Sedaris self-deprecatory wit and occasionally surrealistic choices of descriptors (and events to recall), but the laughs are few and far between.
Actually, David Sedaris makes me wince quite often, usually in shared embarrassment for others (or for his nebbishness). In the piece he read here ("Town and Country"), a NYC South Asian taxi driver irritates the heck of Sedaris. Finally, Sedaris snaps at him. The cabdriver is reduced to silence, but Sedaris feels bad about having been cruel and beats up on himself for the rest of the tale (which has some of those surrealistic details after he gets to his destination, his sister's apartment).
Strange experiences touring America provide grist for Sedaris's mill, as do his adventures in French (those in this volume are mostly in the Normandy village where he and his more skilled in most things boyfriend Hugh live rather than in Paris). It is surprising that he has not exhausted his store of strange tales of growing up in a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina ("The Understudy" and "Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toad Stool" are my favorites) and as a college student (This Old House may be the funniest chapter in the whole book, dealing with an eccentric landlady in a decaying rooming house).
Sedaris can be quite funny about his differences in temperament in contrast to Hugh: "Keeping Up" is partly also about differences in height translating into differences in stride; "Old Faithful" is endearing though close to cloying, which Sedaris rarely is; "All the Beauty You'll Ever Need" which had been announced as the title of the collection before it was published is perhaps the prototype David and Hugh together story. "April in Paris" (which is mostly not set in and certainly not about Paris) and "The Man in the Hut" play on temperamental differences between David and Hugh and the approach of each to natural and social phenomena.
There are some essays/stories that don't work for me ("What I Learned," "Aerial" and "In the Waiting Room"). I've mentioned the ones I like most. There are another seven that I somewhat like. I'm not prepared to make an argument that the ones I like most are the best ones or that ones I dislike are fundamentally different from the ones I most like. "The Smoking Section" is different in being vastly longer and in being a diary with dated entries rather than a retrospectively structured story (presented as nonfiction, albeit from odd angles and probably exaggerated in some particulars).
I think that I liked Me Talk Pretty Someday more -- or liked more in it. I don't think that it is because Talk was more French (in the sense of more of the stories being set in France), because I like the memories of growing up in America stories in Flames among the best. I am interested by Sedaris's reflections on the difficulty of understanding and being understood in another culture and language in both books, and I don't expect to stop reading his pieces as they appear in the New Yorker. Whether he reads his pieces into microphones or I read them on my own, they make me smile and sometimes laugh out loud. (... and sometimes roll my eyes.)
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