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Review by Henry Alford
In his autobiographical essay "The Secret Life of James Thurber," the celebrated humorist limns the mounting sense of disquiet and unease that came over him when he read Salvador Dali's memoirs. Thurber recounts young Dali's exploits -- kicking a playmate off a bridge, biting a sick bat, caressing a crutch and covering himself with goat dung and aspic "that he might give off the true and noble odor of the ram." Thurber, comparing his own more quotidian Columbus, Ohio, boyhood to Dali's extravagances and escapades, comes to this conclusion: "Let me be the first to say that the naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukelele in the attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts."
David Sedaris's new book, Naked, is a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts. A collection of "autobiographical tales," the book chronicles the acerbic National Public Radio commentator's amusingly bizarre life and travails, painting a portrait of a man who is perpetually incongruent with his surroundings. In one chapter, Sedaris's family spends Christmas with a recently paroled prostitute. In another chapter, a cat, run over by Sedaris's mother with her car, complains aloud, "You killed me." In a third, Sedaris does volunteer work at a state mental hospital where the residents scream things such as, "Call the embassy and have them ship the olives by plane!" In short: he's no Anna Quindlen. And for anyone who has struggled through any of the raft of memoirs penned by formerly suburban thirtysomethings, Sedaris's tour-de-farce will be manna.
However, as with Sedaris's first collection -- Barrel Fever, the first half of which was short stories, the second half essays and real-life adventures -- Naked is, at first blush, a potentially uncomfortable mix of fact and fiction. Did the young Sedaris really loiter in front of grocery stores, hoping to be kidnapped by a wealthy family? Did his grandmother really kiss a Greek Orthodox priest's shoes after crawling down the aisle on her hands and knees? Knowing that many of the details in the book parallel details in Sedaris's real life, such questions plagued this overly literal reader in the first few chapters of the book, until I concluded -- the talking cat sealed the deal here -- that the stories are rooted in fact but are extravagantly embroidered. Indeed, the tensions surrounding the compulsion to fictionalize and prevaricate become the centerpiece of one of the book's more satisfying stories. "Cyclops" -- the story with the talking cat -- chronicles Sedaris's father's predilection for telling cautionary but wholly fabricated tales in order to warn his children of various dangers.
Sedaris is at his best when writing about strange obsession. "A Plague of Tics" chronicles young David's recurring need to commit acts such as pressing his tongue against light switches and tapping the heel of his shoe against his forehead. "It wasn't that I enjoyed pressing my nose against the scalding hood of a parked car -- pleasure had nothing to do with it," Sedaris writes. "A person had to do these things because nothing was worse than the anguish of not doing them." Sedaris's family is nonchalant about the proceedings: when David's teachers come to the Sedaris home to express concern, his mother plies them with alcohol, saying, "That's my boy, all right, no flies on him."
If, in baring the vagaries of his soul in the book's first 12 chapters, the author renders himself psychologically naked, in the book's final chapter he renders himself physically naked: he takes a weeklong trip to a nudist trailer park. After much awkwardness and discomfort, Sedaris, heretofore the perpetual sociopath, experiences a kind of communion: "Nudism forces you to think, however briefly, of what we have in common. Churches have been trying to make us think this way for years . . . Distracted by fine clothing and five-hundred-dollar shoes, it's easy to focus on our differences. Naked, it would be so much easier for everyone except the person whose job it is to clean the pews."
Henry Alford is the author of the humor collection Municipal Bondage.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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