The New York Times - USA - Book Review (2020-12-13)

12 SUNDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2020

I BEGAN READING“The Best of Me,” David

Sedaris’s new collection, on an airplane

over the Atlantic. I was covered in prophy-

lactic measures and heavily dosed on

sleeping pills, which might explain the cu-

rious notes I have since discovered in the

margins. “I had a brother-in-law named

The Rooster” is one poignant example, but

what is one to make of the terrifying scrib-

ble, “AH FEAR!,” I ask you? Or, most mys-

terious of all: “348263947” — either a

stranger’s passport number or the combi-

nation to a bank vault. Was I planning a

false identity? A heist? Perhaps we shall

never know, so let us rely instead upon my

final note, which reads: “This is the best

thing Sedaris has ever written.”

In the non-narcotic light of day, I stand

by it. Strange, since “The Best of Me” is a

collection of writing. Ordinary readers

(and I am the most ordinary of readers)

will be expecting a flamboyance of favor-

ites, from his leap to NPR stardom with

“Santaland Diaries” and his quarter-cen-

tury rock-star journey from 1994’s “Barrel

Fever” to 2018’s “Calypso.” Ordinary read-

ers, however, will be wrong. This is not

some Sedarian immaculate collection; in-

stead, as he himself writes in the introduc-

tion, the pieces “are the sort I hoped to

produce back when I first started writing,

at the age of 20.” They are what he hoped

he would be. They are the best of him. Has

Sedaris included “Santaland Diaries”? He

has not. Has Sedaris included “The Moth-

erless Bear,” a work of fiction that elicited a

great deal of hate mail, including entreat-

ies to donate to bear-rescue organiza-

tions? He has. Is Amy here? Yep. His

mom? His dad? The Rooster who becomes

The Juicester? Bien sûr. In fact, this book

is all about his family and... all right, I’ll

say it: love.

No point planning a heist; Sedaris has

opened the vault himself. The genius of

“The Best of Me” is that it reveals the

growth of a writer, a sense of how his out-

look has changed and where he finds hu-

mor. In his early fiction — the hilariously

petty tyrants of “Glen’s Homophobia

Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2” and “Front Row

Center With Thaddeus Bristol” — Sedaris

finds it in cruelty: “In the role of Mary,”

Thaddeus remarks in his review of Sacred

Heart Elementary’s Christmas pageant,

“6-year-old Shannon Burke just barely

manages to pass herself off as a virgin.”

That cruelty continues in Sedaris’s

pseudo-autobiographical work, but the

monster we are seeing through is “David

Sedaris.” In “The Incomplete Quad,” he

imagines his family envying his life: “Me,

the winner.” Paragraph break, next para-

graph: “I was cooking spaghetti and

ketchup in my electric skillet one night....

” It is a delicious pleasure to understand an

obliviousness that Sedaris (supposedly)

does not. “There weren’t many people I

truly hated back then,” he tells us about his

prepubescent self in “Memory Laps,” “30,

maybe 45 at most.” The subject, in many of

the pieces Sedaris has selected, is the judg-

ment and pain we inflict on one another,

and by “we” Sedaris does not mean people

in general. He means him. And he means

you. And he means me.

THEN, AFTER THE WICKED GLEEof finding

humor in pain (and I recommend reading

the first volume of Sedaris’s diaries, “Theft

by Finding,” to see how true this is to his

nature), we arrive at a series of grace

notes. The dangers of taking chances for

gay men in a previous era, and the loves

thereby lost, are movingly described in “A

Guy Walks Into a Bar Car,” and for those

obsessed with the character of Hugh, there

is much of him as well, appearing almost in

reverse: as a front-seat passenger in “Pos-

session” and a dubious boyfriend in “Den-

tists Without Borders,” until at last, 300

pages in, he and David are introduced. But

it is the Sedaris family that carries the

book: from childhood — when David per-

suades the toddler Tiffany to lie down in

front of cars to cause grief to their mother,

who has locked them out in the snow for

being insufferable — to adulthood, cack-

ling over bestiality magazines with Amy —

to growing old, with its concomitant sor-

rows and, most surprising of all, happi-

ness. “Happiness is harder to put into

words,” Sedaris writes in “Leviathan,” one

of the final essays. “It’s also harder to

source, much more mysterious than anger

or sorrow.” It is miraculous to read these

pieces placed close together, the earliest

written without any knowledge of where

things would lead, the last guffawing at the

ridiculousness of where they did. “Look

how our lives turned out!” he imagines

himself and his sisters thinking as they

shop for absurd clothing in “The Perfect

Fit.” “What a surprise!”

Not everything turns out OK. If you have

not read all of Sedaris, then I will not spoil

the grief, or the joy, of his family’s arc. And

if you have read all of Sedaris, well, then

you have probably spent the intervening

years entering the cartoon contests in the

back of The New Yorker and baking prune

challahs and pickling your children in ado-

ration and rage and have therefore forgot-

ten everything. Time to start again. You

must read “The Best of Me.” It will be a

new experience, knowing that enough

time has passed to find humor in the hard-

est parts of life. More than ever — we’re al-

lowed to laugh. 0

Sedaris Studies

A new collection defines who he is and how he’s grown as a writer.

By ANDREW SEAN GREER

David Sedaris

PHOTOGRAPH BY VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

ANDREW SEAN GREER’Smost recent novel,

“Less,” won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize.

THE BEST OF ME

By David Sedaris

338 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.

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