Off the Books

On Literature and Culture

J. Peder Zane

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611175097
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Head Off the Books in this collection of newspaper columns, where J. Peder Zane uses classic and contemporary literature to explore American culture and politics. The book review editor for the Raleigh, North Carolina News & Observer from 1996 to 2009, Zane demonstrates that good books are essential for understanding ourselves and the world around us. The one hundred and thirty columns gathered in Off the Books find that sweet spot where literature's eternal values meet the day's current events. Together they offer a literary overview of the ideas, issues, and events shaping our culture—from 9/11 and the struggle for gay rights to the decline of high culture and the rise of sensationalism and solipsism. As they plumb and draw from the work of leading writers—from William Faulkner, Knut Hamsun, and Eudora Welty to Don DeLillo, Lydia Millet, and Philip Roth—these columns make an argument not just about the pleasure of books, but about their very necessity in our lives and culture.

SOUTHERN WRITING LIVES

David Sedaris: Him Write Pretty

For Mark Twain, it was piloting riverboats down the mighty Mississippi. For Ernest Hemingway, it was driving ambulances across the blood-soaked fields of World War I. For David Sedaris, the formative experience that propelled him to the top ranks of American letters was working as an elf at Macy’s. Before elfdom (BE), Sedaris was a recovering drug addict working odd jobs as his mind spun fantasies of fame and fortune.

After elfdom (AE), he achieved success beyond his wildest hopes.

The abracadabra moment that turned a 35-year-old elf into a major writer occurred in the wee hours of Dec. 23, 1992. That’s when the NPR program Morning Edition broadcast “SantaLand Diaries,” his comic essay about Christmas at Macy’s.

Through finely crafted sentences that articulated a gentle, self-deprecating wit, the piece contrasted the high hopes Sedaris had carried to the city of dreams with bracing reality. “I am trying to look on the bright side,” he explained. “I figure that at least as an elf I will have a place; I’ll be in Santa’s Village with all the other elves. We will reside in a fluffy wonderland surrounded by candy canes and gingerbread shacks. It won’t be quite as sad as standing on some street corner dressed as a french fry.”

“SantaLand Diaries” was the most popular segment in the show’s history, and Sedaris became a star. A publisher asked him to write a book of stories, “Barrel Fever” (1994). In the 11 years since, he has produced four more collections of comic personal essays, often focusing on the outsized personalities of his parents and five siblings. His latest work, “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim,” debuted in June 2004 atop the New York Times best-seller list. A contributor to NPR, the New Yorker and Esquire, he has earned critical acclaim as well as the most prestigious prize for American humor writing, the James Thurber Award.

Since seeing Sedaris perform at N.C. State University last spring, I’ve happily immersed myself in his work, tearing through his five collections, avoiding minor traffic accidents while absorbed in the audio versions. As my jaw and stomach ached with laughter, I encountered a virtuoso whose work encompasses the past and present of literary humor. His soaring imagination echoes James Thurber in full Walter Mitty flight. His kooky self-awareness reads like vintage Woody Allen. The pitch-perfect ear he uses to craft beautifully modulated sentences is reminiscent of the 20th century’s greatest comic writer, P. G. Wodehouse.

Yet Sedaris is also an original. His paradoxical style—ironic yet earnest, cruel yet kind, self-absorbed yet empathetic—has influenced a new generation of writers such as Sarah Vowell, Neal Pollack and Dave Eggers. His adventures in the land of creative nonfiction have shown that memoir does not always require self-immolation, that it is possible to write about pain and dysfunction with a wry smile.

On paper, it is easy to divide Sedaris’s life and work into two neat segments: BE and AE, as though his life had been changed—poof!—by elfin magic. But no writer’s life is a jagged edge; it is always a flowing river.

This is especially true for Sedaris, who continually draws from the waters of his youth in Raleigh to nourish his mature work. Through a close reading of his books, we can develop a Unified Theory of David Sedaris, one that merges his pre- and post-elf periods, to shed light on the wellsprings of his prose and his rare ability to enlarge his essays into commentaries on modern America.

KNACK FOR NEATNESS

“It’s important to have clean money—not new, but well maintained”—from “Naked”

The first thing you notice is that Sedaris has always played to his strengths, even when those gifts were not so obvious.

In the beginning, Sedaris was a neatnik. As a child, he asked Santa for a vacuum cleaner. He prohibited his siblings from “crossing the threshold” of his room, for fear they might bring disorder to his “immaculate … shrine.” As a famous writer visiting one sister’s unkempt apartment, he fights the urge “to get down on my knees and scrub until my fingers bleed.”

As a youth, this need for order expressed itself more darkly through the obsessive-compulsive behavior he describes in the story “A Plague of Tics.” The short walk between his school and home—“no more than six-hundred thirty-seven steps”—might take an hour as he paused “every few feet to tongue a mailbox or touch whichever single leaf or blade of grass demanded my attention…. It might be raining or maybe I had to go to the bathroom, but running home was not an option. This was a long and complicated process that demanded an oppressive attention to detail.”

When Sedaris tells us he often made his living as a rent-a-maid during his pre-elf days, we can only conclude: Sweating the details is exactly what he should be doing.

Then we reread the sentences he has crafted to document himself: “I could be wrong, but according to my calculations, I got exactly fourteen minutes of sleep during my first year of college. I’d always had my own bedroom, a meticulously clean and well-ordered place where I could practice my habits in private. Now I would have a roommate, some complete stranger spoiling my routine with his God-given right to exist.”

Notice the brisk pace and perfect rhythm, the precise details that flow effortlessly to the unforced punch line. This is the hallmark of Sedaris’s writing style—clean, taut, measured. Never slack or lazy, it reflects tremendous care. His prose is as polished as his old bedroom.

SLAP OF REALITY

“[My parents] always knew how special I was, that I had something extra, that I would eventually become a big celebrity who would belong to the entire world and not just to them”—from “Barrel Fever”

Despite Sedaris’s best efforts to bring order to the world, reality never quite measured up to the meticulously constructed images that filled his young mind. He seems to have spent most of his pre-elfin life concocting elaborate fantasies of celebrity. He imagined himself as a famous artist, a famous writer of daytime dramas and the famous star of a prime-time program featuring him and a pet monkey named Socrates.

Sedaris gave full flight to these dreams in his first collection, “Barrel Fever,” which consists almost entirely of fantasy stories. The opening line reads, “I was on ‘Oprah’ a while ago, talking about how I used to love too much. Did you see it?” Through this voice, he not only articulates his interior life but also gently mocks modern America, where all are assured that they are gifted, talented, unique.

In “Don’s Story,” he satirizes this self-important standpoint—and himself—with subtle brilliance. The semi-autobiographical tale features a man who believes his unexceptional life is riveting. Lo and behold, so does the rest of the world when he comes to Hollywood and makes a movie about himself that wins best actor, best director and best picture.

In one passage, studio honcho Brandon Tartikoff introduces Don to Barbra Streisand. “Brandon told Barbra Streisand that my name was Don and that I used to wash dishes at K&W Cafeteria and, ha, ha, I tell you, Barbra Streisand just couldn’t ask enough questions.

“‘A dishwasher! Tell me, was it a conveyor run-through Waste King Jet System or a double hot sink layout? What detergents did you use? At what temperature does a drinking glass become quote unquote clean.’ She took my arm and led me into the house, which was just absolutely teeming with celebrities.”

“Naked” (1997), the collection that followed “Barrel Fever,” opens with more fantasy: “I’m thinking of asking the servants to wax my change before placing it in the Chinese tank I keep on my dresser.” But then he makes a crucial turn. By page four, the character’s mother is assailing him for “yammering on” about nonsense. “Find your father,” she orders. “If he’s not underneath his car, he’s probably working on the septic system.”

This quick slap awakens reality, and it begins to dominate Sedaris’s work. Instead of creating fictional characters, he makes characters of those around him. Rather than yammering on about a world that doesn’t exist, he details his own life—his obsessive-compulsive behavior and addiction to methamphetamine; his painful realization that his homosexuality might make him an outcast; his years of struggle in New York, his salad days in France; his relationship with his family and his longtime partner, Hugh.

From now on, his fantasies give way to measured self-awareness.

DARING EMPATHY

“In imagining myself as modest, mysterious, and fiercely intelligent, I’m forced to realize that, in real life, I have none of these qualities”—from “Me Talk Pretty One Day”

In a typical story, his subject starts not with a dream but a mindset, a set way of looking at the world. Along the narrative arc, the hammer drops and the character is forced to see more broadly. Many critics have characterized these reality checks as moments of humiliation, arguing that Sedaris’s comedy of manners revolves around embarrassment. This misreading robs his work of its intellectual nuance and depth.

Consider his story from “Me Talk Pretty One Day” (2000) about the time Sedaris took guitar lessons from a midget. “Not a dwarf,” he writes, “but an honest-to-God midget…. His arms were manly and covered in coarse dark hair, but his voice was high and strange, as if it had been recorded and was now being played back at a faster speed.” He uses this fact to one-up his siblings, who also were forced to take music lessons. “With a midget,” he boasts, “I’d definitely won the my-teacher-is-stranger-than-yours competition.”

Nevertheless, Sedaris comes to trust this object of ridicule enough to reveal his secret passion: singing commercial jingles for Oscar Mayer Weiners or Raleigh’s Cameron Village in the voice of Billie Holiday. “The Excitement of Cameron Village Will Carry You Away.” (Funny enough on the page, yet hearing Sedaris croon it on the audio version of “Me Talk Pretty” is beyond category.)

The guitar teacher cuts short his performance.

“‘Hey guy,’ he said. ‘You can hold it right there. I’m not into that scene…. There were plenty of screwballs like you back in Atlanta, but me, I don’t swing that way.’”

Typically, Sedaris does not analyze this remark, or ponder it, or wrestle with its clear implication. No doubt the teacher’s response embarrassed him, but that is not the central point, which is tolerance—the notion that when you look under the hood, we’re all a little strange. At its best, his work embodies this daring empathy that recognizes differences, sometimes ridicules them, but ultimately accepts them with a playful shrug.

Sedaris is not only a gifted writer but also an important one in large part because of his ability to both mock political correctness and reinforce it at its most profound level.

POIGNANT FLAWS

“[My sister Tiffany] later phoned my brother, referring to me as Fairy Poppins, which wouldn’t bother me if it weren’t so apt”—from “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim.”

In a recent New York Times article, the humorist P. J. O’Rourke said there are two major themes in American comedy: The “What a fool am I” tradition and the “What a fool are you” approach.

Sedaris is part of a Third Wave that says: Oh, what fools are we all, and isn’t it great?

He can be cruel, as he was to his guitar teacher. Southerners, whom he loves to portray as daffy yokels, are favorite targets of derision. Here’s how he describes one co-worker: “One look at his teeth, and you could understand his crusade for universal health care.”

Disabled people are a steady source of laughs, and so are black people. In the story about how the Dutch believe that “Six to Eight Black Men” help Santa dispense presents, he writes: “This, I think, is the greatest difference between us and the Dutch. While a certain segment of our population might be perfectly happy with the arrangement, if you told the average white American that six to eight nameless black men would be sneaking into his house in the middle of the night, he would barricade the doors and arm himself with whatever he could get his hands on.”

That comment may test the bounds of politeness. But it loses its harsh edge in the larger context of Sedaris’s work.

In one story, the writer tells us his father kicked him out of the house when he learned his son was gay. In another, we watch his brother, Paul, introduce him to his baby daughter as “Uncle Faggot.”

All of this becomes water under the bridge. The father and son quickly reconcile, David brushes off his brother’s remark. Whether he is describing his family members or passing acquaintances, the aha! moment does not occur when someone’s failings are revealed but with the recognition that we’re all flawed, all traveling down the same river in the same boat.

This quality also answers one of the central riddles surrounding his work: How can someone who writes so frequently and openly about homosexual desire sell millions of books?

Sedaris is not a gay writer, but a writer who is gay. He does not politicize his homosexuality; he humanizes it, enabling readers to do the same.

However, he makes it easy for the reader’s tolerance to end at his shore.

PROSE PORTRAITIST

“My father favored a chair in the basement, but my mother was apt to lie down anywhere, waking with carpet burns on her face or the pattern of the sofa embossed into the soft flesh of her upper arms”—from “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim”

Comedy often challenges the audience—think of Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor. Sedaris is more interested in making them feel comfortable. His humor never implicates readers, never directly forces them to consider their own thoughts and actions.

This approach does not seem calculated; it’s how Sedaris’s mind works. He is, at heart, a portrait painter, a master of the character sketch who can make people pulse with life on the page.

His mother “was the sort of person who could talk to anyone, not in the pointed, investigative manner that the situation called for, but generally, casually. Had she been sent to interview Charles Manson, she might have come away saying, ‘I never knew he liked bamboo!’”

His father, “a tight man with a dollar,” would never “buy anything not marked REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE. Without that orange tag, an item was virtually invisible to him.”

His sister Lisa “is a person who once witnessed a car ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Between the Covers: Classic Fiction
• Beyond the Covers: Contemporary Fiction
• Southern Writing Lives
• Just the Facts? Nonfiction Reviews
• Taking Cover: The Assault on the Book Business
• Binding Devotion: Book Culture
• Anything Goes: New Standards, Shifting Boundaries
• Really?: Truth and Truthiness
• Sensationalism: Nothing More Than Feelings
• Letting It All Hang Out: The Rise of Raunch
• Identity: Race, Gay Rights, and 9/11
• New Directions in a Changing Landscape