Originally published in The Minnesota Daily’s A&E Magazine,
March 13th, 1997
Diary of a Madman
By David Sedaris
Little, Brown, $21.95
Sedaris
gained national attention by reading his essays on NPR, astonishing listeners
with stories of an epically comic and embarrassingly familiar America. His
“SantaLand Diaries,” which chronicle his job working as a Macy’s Christmas elf,
make the Santa scene from A Christmas Story seem as warm and fuzzy as Miracle
on 34th Street. And his essay “Giantess” tells the story of his brief
flirtation with writing erotic fiction. For those of us living under a rock, Giantess
magazine traffics in stories and pictorials about normal women who somehow
grow to more than fifty or sixty feet tall. Hearing Giantess’ editor
explain the magazine’s style guide is priceless:
“Do you
know what I’m talking about, Dave? I need to hear those clothes
splitting apart. Do you think you can do that for me?”
Barrel
Fever collected four of Sedaris’ essays and twelve of his short stories
(which are all—every last one of them—shit-your-pants funny), but his new book,
Naked, is strictly nonfiction—and God help us if it’s all true. Although
each chapter is written in a compact essay format, Naked is pretty much
Sedaris’ life story, and like so many of the best contemporary memoirs (Tobias
Wolff’s This Boy’s Life or Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club), the key
word is dysfunction.
The
already classic second chapter, “A Plague of Tics” (which Sedaris read on NPR
last month), tells the story of the author’s childhood compulsions: counting
everything, ritually pressing his nose and elbows to objects, obsessively
shaking his head, licking light switches, cars, and lawn ornaments—the kid is
just plain weird. But he can’t help it; a voice in his head demands that he
obsess:
“What
about that television antenna? Is it still set into that perfect V, or has one of
your sisters destroyed its integrity? You know, I was just wondering how
tightly the lid is screwed onto that mayonnaise jar. Let’s have a look, shall
we?”
Sedaris
becomes more functional as he gets older, but he doesn’t become any more
normal. And what’s amazing is that the crowds he finds himself in make him look
like Beaver Cleaver in comparison. The chapter “Dix Hill” finds Sedaris
volunteering at the local insane asylum, and in “The Drama Bug” he gets a part
in a local production of Hamlet and discovers who the real lunatics are.
Then
things begin to get strange. He begins hitchhiking as a teenager, and the
chapter “Planet of the Apes” recounts some of the most outrageous road
adventures ever recorded. Sedaris has an uncanny ability to recreate people’s
speech, and when he (wisely) gives up hitchhiking, he starts taking the bus
cross-country—and the linguistic fireworks begin. Anyone who’s ever been on a
long bus trip knows how the conversations alternate between amazing and
mind-numbing, and Sedaris gets it all down. In “C.O.G.” (which stands for Child
of God), he faithfully recreates a one-way conversation with a raving maniac
who can only be described as ingeniously obscene:
“I said,
‘motherfucker, you haven’t got the fucking balls God gave a goddamned church
mouse. You crawled out of your mama’s tattered old pussy, grabbed hold of her
milk-stained titties, and you ain’t never looked back, motherfucker.’ I said,
‘If you don’t want this baby, then I’ll find some son of a bitch who does,
someone who don’t look at the world through the slit of his shit-blistered,
faggoty-assed, worm-sized dick.’ I said, ‘This baby might be a bastard, but I
guaran-fucking-tee you it won’t be half the bastard its daddy is, you fucking
bastard, you! You can suck the cream out of my granddaddy’s withered old
cum-stained cock before I’ll ever, and I mean ever, let you look into
this baby’s wrinkly-assed face, you stupid fucking shithead.’”
The
book’s not all this outrageous, of course. Sedaris’ family is insane, but
endearingly so, and the parts about his mother’s death are intense and moving.
Never lapsing into sentimentality (his mother would laugh at him), Sedaris
recounts both the tragedy (in “Ashes”) and the comedy (in “The Women’s Open”)
of such an important passing. The latter essay, especially, brings out the
utter strangeness of the idea of memorial when Sedaris’ sister watches a
special video their mother left her, only to find that their father had
recorded a golf tournament over it.
The book
ends with the title chapter, a completely incongruous (and, by Sedaris’
standards, appropriate) essay on his week-long stay at a nudist colony. Just
imagine: David Sedaris surrounded by a bunch of really weird naked people. The
mind reels with possibilities, and Sedaris eclipses them all.
—David Wiley
