Book Review: Sedaris’ latest chart-topper falls flat

Diarist/writer David Sedaris makes his living by exposing himself.

No, no, not in a sexual sense, or public nakedness, though one could claim that he flaunts certain elements of his homosexuality and he seems overly open to discussing bodily functions (of almost every kind).

As diarist/blogger/memoirist, Sedaris reveals almost every aspect of his personal life and makes us laugh at the mirror images of our own lives.

His latest collection of essays, “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” stands at the top of the non-fiction best seller lists this week, a tribute to his wacky self-deprecating humor. But this time he recasts many of his previous “confessions” in ways that we’ve heard before.

The man is a funny, funny writer — when he’s on — as attested to by his five wildly successful previous books, including “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.”

Unfortunately, with the exception of the last-83 page essay called “The Smoking Section,” Sedaris mostly deals in mundanities that might have seemed funny at the time he jotted his notes, but his flair for hyperbole and exaggeration pushes the “humor” astray.

Such pieces include a parasitic worm living in his former mother-in-law’s leg, a bout with a dingo and buying a human skeleton as a birthday gift for his lover, Hugh.

For the most part, the essays in the collection have appeared in the New Yorker and NPR’s “This American Life,” so readers find a certain familiarity. In some cases, too much familiarity, as if they meet Sedaris for the third or fourth time at a cocktail party while he tells the same funny stories with all of his hyperbolic flair, and he laughs at his own joke. When he throws in a sentimental “truth” at the end for emphasis, we cringe and think, “Well, uh huh, yeah, OK.”

But, for anyone who has never read Sedaris, it’s like coming to the party in the middle of his tales and feeling beguiled by his self-deprecating humor and antic flights from reality.

However, for previous fans of the author, the collection disappoints. Many of these stories scrape the barrel of his daily existence to complete the manuscript on time for the publisher, thus lack the polish and luster of his carefully-crafted gems.

In that one gem about breaking the addiction of smoking while spending a couple of months in Tokyo with Hugh, Sedaris provides more humor — and insight — about his inability to learn Japanese than about ridding himself of the nicotine monkey.

Every event, every nuance of Sedaris daily life becomes material for his musing, regardless of how petty or minor. As a total note-taker, he stops the flow of the day to jot down the observances of the immediate past, then he adds, puffs, exploits and exaggerates until those simple moments become small snow globes that he turns upside down to flow back as life scenes.

Or, at least that’s what he did in “Barrel Fever” and the brilliant “Naked,” but not in this latest collection. Imagine the excitement at the following opening, then realize that the piece goes nowhere after its grand start:

“On the flight to Raleigh, I sneezed, and the cough drop I’d been sucking on shot from my mouth, ricocheted off my folded tray table, and landed, as I remembered it, on the lap of the woman beside me, who was asleep and had her arms folded across her chest. I’m surprised the force didn’t wake her — that’s how hard it hit — but all she did was flutter her eyelids and let out a tiny sigh, the kind you might hear from a baby. Under normal circumstances, I’d had three choice, the first being to do nothing.”

“When You Are Engulfed in Flames” promises much and delivers only a little, but a smidgeon of David Sedaris is better than none.

A.L. Shaff is a freelance writer for the Green Valley News.

Details

Title: “When You Are Engulfed in Flames”

Author: David Sedaris

Length: 323 pages

Publisher: Little, Brown

Price: $25.99, hardcover