Critics' Reviews of Me Talk Pretty One Day
As readers of his 1997 best seller ''Naked'' already know, David Sedaris is part Walter Mitty, part Garry Shandling, part Andy Rooney, with a little bit of Oscar Wilde thrown in for good measure: a campy commentator on the absurdities of contemporary life, a writer whose favorite subject always remains himself.
A sequel of sorts to ''Naked,'' his latest book, ''Me Talk Pretty One Day,'' amplifies the antic family portrait he created in the earlier book, while recounting his adventures in New York and Paris. Whereas ''Naked'' reads like a series of overlapping autobiographical essays, this volume feels more like a collection of magazine pieces or columns on pressing matters like the care and feeding of family pets and the travails of dining in Manhattan. But if Mr. Sedaris sometimes sounds as though he were making do with leftover material, ''Talk Pretty'' still makes for diverting reading.
At the same time this volume shows Mr. Sedaris intermittantly trying to step out of his role as curmudgeonly complainer. Though he still whips off the tart put-down with practiced ease -- ''it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you've come to mow its lawns,'' he complains of American tourists in Paris -- he also shows himself capable, in these pages, of something approaching empathy and introspection.
As readers learned in ''Naked,'' the Sedaris clan -- at least the Sedaris clan as depicted by Mr. Sedaris -- is a family of crackpots and eccentrics. His father -- an I.B.M. engineer who loves jazz, Great Danes and complicated mathematical equations -- is so cheap that he buys food that's been reduced for quick sale and hoards it long past its expiration date. His mother, who appeared more prominently in ''Naked,'' revives a dying puppy by putting it in a casserole and popping it in the oven.
His sister Gretchen is a ''tan orexic,'' whose passion for the sun has evolved ''from an intense hobby to something more closely resembling a psychological dysfunction.'' And his younger brother Paul is portrayed as a foul-mouthed pot smoker, who is nonetheless the one of the six children to show up at their father's house on Thanksgiving to try to prepare a traditional Greek meal.
As for Mr. Sedaris, he comes across, much as he did in ''Naked,'' as a self-dramatizing narcissist, by turns egomaniac and self-deprecating, needy and judgmental. He cannot abide people who smoke Merit cigarettes, wear cowboy boots or ''consider the human scalp an appropriate palette for self-expression.'' Equally loathsome to him are the words ''flick,'' ''freebie,'' ''cyberspace,'' ''progressive'' and ''zeitgeist,'' and abbreviated street designations like ''59th and Lex.''
As a boy Mr. Sedaris daydreams of becoming an artist, but it's the lifestyle, not the work, that appeals: he can picture ''the long satin scarves and magazine covers'' but can't quite envision what sort of artwork he'd actually do. He toys with the idea of becoming a ''song stylist,'' performing for television commercials in the voice of Billie Holiday. And when that fantasy fails to materialize, he flirts with a career as a conceptual artist, a career that is fueled by the energizing fumes of crystal meth and that comes to an abrupt halt when his drug dealer skips town.
Mr. Sedaris's other daydreams are even more grandiose. He dreams of becoming a world-famous scientist who not only cures AIDS, paralysis and mental retardation but also concocts a soap that rejuvenates aging skin. He fantasizes about becoming the first gay heavyweight champion of the world. And he imagines himself as a genius version of Monica Lewinsky: a pudgy girl who has sex with the president of the United States, goes to jail for refusing to answer questions and later writes the novel ''Lolita.''
''My epic fantasies offer the illusion of generosity but never the real thing,'' he writes. ''I give to some only so I can withhold from others. It's fine to cure the leukemia sufferers but much more satisfying to imagine the parade of opportunists confounded by my refusal to cooperate. In imagining myself as modest, mysterious and fiercely intelligent, I'm forced to realize that, in real life, I have none of these qualities. Nobody dreams of the things he already has. I'm not sure which is more unlikely: the chance that I'll sleep with the president or the hope that I will one day learn to keep a secret.''
As this book and ''Naked'' make all too clear, Mr. Sedaris has made a career of not keeping secrets and recounting those secrets in a voice that uses hyperbole as matter-of-factly as the soap opera stars he says he's tried to emulate. He observes that Great Danes generally don't live very long: ''There are cheeses with a longer shelf life.'' And he describes a fellow student in French class as having ''front teeth the size of tombstones.''
Mr. Sedaris's bitchiness can easily wear thin, however, and in the slighter pieces -- like one about his brief stint as a writing teacher -- his efforts to send up himself and his supporting cast are neither comical nor convincing, merely petulant. Indeed, the stronger chapters in this book tend to be the ones that mix satire with sentiment, brazenness with rumination. Those pieces reveal a writer who is capable not only of being funny, but touching, even tender, too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/16/books/books-of-the-times-the-zeitgeist-of-cyberspace-isn-t-at-59th-and-lex.html?scp=1&sq=me%20talk%20pretty%20one%20day%20review&st=cse
Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris (Naked) focuses on the icy patches that mar life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's. Many of the 27 short essays collected here (which appeared originally in the New Yorker, Esquire and elsewhere) deal with his father, Lou, to whom the book is dedicated. Lou is a micromanager who tries to get his uninterested children to form a jazz combo and, when that fails, insists on boosting David's career as a performance artist by heckling him from the audience. Sedaris suggests that his father's punishment for being overly involved in his kids' artistic lives is David's brother Paul, otherwise known as "The Rooster," a half-literate miscreant whose language is outrageously profane. Sedaris also writes here about the time he spent in France and the difficulty of learning another language. After several extended stays in a little Norman village and in Paris, Sedaris had progressed, he observes, "from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. 'Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window." But in English, Sedaris is nothing if not nimble: in one essay he goes from his cat's cremation to his mother's in a way that somehow manages to remain reverent to both of the departed. "Reliable sources" have told Sedaris that he has "tended to exhaust people," and true to form, he will exhaust readers of this new book, tooDwith helpless laughter.
-Publisher's Weekly
A sequel of sorts to ''Naked,'' his latest book, ''Me Talk Pretty One Day,'' amplifies the antic family portrait he created in the earlier book, while recounting his adventures in New York and Paris. Whereas ''Naked'' reads like a series of overlapping autobiographical essays, this volume feels more like a collection of magazine pieces or columns on pressing matters like the care and feeding of family pets and the travails of dining in Manhattan. But if Mr. Sedaris sometimes sounds as though he were making do with leftover material, ''Talk Pretty'' still makes for diverting reading.
At the same time this volume shows Mr. Sedaris intermittantly trying to step out of his role as curmudgeonly complainer. Though he still whips off the tart put-down with practiced ease -- ''it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you've come to mow its lawns,'' he complains of American tourists in Paris -- he also shows himself capable, in these pages, of something approaching empathy and introspection.
As readers learned in ''Naked,'' the Sedaris clan -- at least the Sedaris clan as depicted by Mr. Sedaris -- is a family of crackpots and eccentrics. His father -- an I.B.M. engineer who loves jazz, Great Danes and complicated mathematical equations -- is so cheap that he buys food that's been reduced for quick sale and hoards it long past its expiration date. His mother, who appeared more prominently in ''Naked,'' revives a dying puppy by putting it in a casserole and popping it in the oven.
His sister Gretchen is a ''tan orexic,'' whose passion for the sun has evolved ''from an intense hobby to something more closely resembling a psychological dysfunction.'' And his younger brother Paul is portrayed as a foul-mouthed pot smoker, who is nonetheless the one of the six children to show up at their father's house on Thanksgiving to try to prepare a traditional Greek meal.
As for Mr. Sedaris, he comes across, much as he did in ''Naked,'' as a self-dramatizing narcissist, by turns egomaniac and self-deprecating, needy and judgmental. He cannot abide people who smoke Merit cigarettes, wear cowboy boots or ''consider the human scalp an appropriate palette for self-expression.'' Equally loathsome to him are the words ''flick,'' ''freebie,'' ''cyberspace,'' ''progressive'' and ''zeitgeist,'' and abbreviated street designations like ''59th and Lex.''
As a boy Mr. Sedaris daydreams of becoming an artist, but it's the lifestyle, not the work, that appeals: he can picture ''the long satin scarves and magazine covers'' but can't quite envision what sort of artwork he'd actually do. He toys with the idea of becoming a ''song stylist,'' performing for television commercials in the voice of Billie Holiday. And when that fantasy fails to materialize, he flirts with a career as a conceptual artist, a career that is fueled by the energizing fumes of crystal meth and that comes to an abrupt halt when his drug dealer skips town.
Mr. Sedaris's other daydreams are even more grandiose. He dreams of becoming a world-famous scientist who not only cures AIDS, paralysis and mental retardation but also concocts a soap that rejuvenates aging skin. He fantasizes about becoming the first gay heavyweight champion of the world. And he imagines himself as a genius version of Monica Lewinsky: a pudgy girl who has sex with the president of the United States, goes to jail for refusing to answer questions and later writes the novel ''Lolita.''
''My epic fantasies offer the illusion of generosity but never the real thing,'' he writes. ''I give to some only so I can withhold from others. It's fine to cure the leukemia sufferers but much more satisfying to imagine the parade of opportunists confounded by my refusal to cooperate. In imagining myself as modest, mysterious and fiercely intelligent, I'm forced to realize that, in real life, I have none of these qualities. Nobody dreams of the things he already has. I'm not sure which is more unlikely: the chance that I'll sleep with the president or the hope that I will one day learn to keep a secret.''
As this book and ''Naked'' make all too clear, Mr. Sedaris has made a career of not keeping secrets and recounting those secrets in a voice that uses hyperbole as matter-of-factly as the soap opera stars he says he's tried to emulate. He observes that Great Danes generally don't live very long: ''There are cheeses with a longer shelf life.'' And he describes a fellow student in French class as having ''front teeth the size of tombstones.''
Mr. Sedaris's bitchiness can easily wear thin, however, and in the slighter pieces -- like one about his brief stint as a writing teacher -- his efforts to send up himself and his supporting cast are neither comical nor convincing, merely petulant. Indeed, the stronger chapters in this book tend to be the ones that mix satire with sentiment, brazenness with rumination. Those pieces reveal a writer who is capable not only of being funny, but touching, even tender, too.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/16/books/books-of-the-times-the-zeitgeist-of-cyberspace-isn-t-at-59th-and-lex.html?scp=1&sq=me%20talk%20pretty%20one%20day%20review&st=cse
Sedaris is Garrison Keillor's evil twin: like the Minnesota humorist, Sedaris (Naked) focuses on the icy patches that mar life's sidewalk, though the ice in his work is much more slippery and the falls much more spectacularly funny than in Keillor's. Many of the 27 short essays collected here (which appeared originally in the New Yorker, Esquire and elsewhere) deal with his father, Lou, to whom the book is dedicated. Lou is a micromanager who tries to get his uninterested children to form a jazz combo and, when that fails, insists on boosting David's career as a performance artist by heckling him from the audience. Sedaris suggests that his father's punishment for being overly involved in his kids' artistic lives is David's brother Paul, otherwise known as "The Rooster," a half-literate miscreant whose language is outrageously profane. Sedaris also writes here about the time he spent in France and the difficulty of learning another language. After several extended stays in a little Norman village and in Paris, Sedaris had progressed, he observes, "from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. 'Is thems the thoughts of cows?' I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window." But in English, Sedaris is nothing if not nimble: in one essay he goes from his cat's cremation to his mother's in a way that somehow manages to remain reverent to both of the departed. "Reliable sources" have told Sedaris that he has "tended to exhaust people," and true to form, he will exhaust readers of this new book, tooDwith helpless laughter.
-Publisher's Weekly
