Books

In David Sedaris's world, no one is safe and no cow is sacred. A manic cross between Mark Leyner, Fran Lebowitz, and the National Enquirer, Sedaris's collection of essays is a rollicking tour through the national Zeitgeist: a do-it-yourself suburban dad saves money by performing home surgery; a man who is loved too much flees the heavyweight champion of the world; a teenage suicide tries to incite a lynch mob at her funeral; a bitter Santa abuses the elves.

David Sedaris made his debut on NPR's Morning Edition with "SantaLand Diaries," recounting his strange-but-true experiences as an elf at Macy's, and soon became one of the show's most popular commentators. With a perfect eye and a voice infused with as much empathy as wit, Sedaris writes stories and essays that target the soulful ridiculousness of our behavior. Barrel Fever is like a blind date with modern life, and anything can happen.

I am told David Sedaris has amassed quite a devoted following. Many readers have found his work to be incredibly funny. A while back, in my first conversation about Sedaris, Barrel Fever was suggested as the book I should read first as my introduction to the author. Before I read Barrel Fever my sister-in-law-to-be told me it was the worst book to start with, but I had already acquired a copy.

The book is a mere 200 pages, so thankfully it did not take long to read. The breakdown of short stories to essays was a 3:1 ratio. The first 150 pages were short stories and the remaining 50 were various essays.

The second worst thing I could do right now would be actually telling Kristen she was right. The single worst thing I could do is read Barrel Fever a second time...with a small exception. Or rather 50 pages of small exceptions.

I normally do not like short stories. I have a hard time differentiating characters, especially when they are so similar like they were in The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami.

The characters created by Sedaris were not so similar that I had difficulty remembering who was who, but the stories were not good. I did not like a single one of the short stories. I did laugh a few times, but it was at single situations, not the premise of any of the stories. They were not funny, though they had funny parts...if that makes any sense to you. The plots were dark and almost everyone included an interjected comment about a character's secret homosexual affair with another character. None had any relevance its respective story. The tone of the short stories was very similar to that of Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters; a book that I did not enjoy from an author I do enjoy.

For the essays it was almost as if they had been penned by an entirely different person. They were very enjoyable. Had the ratio of short stories to essays favored the essays I would surely have listed Barrel Fever as "Read" instead.

If you tell me to give author David Sedaris a second chance, you had better suggest a book that is more like his essays and less like the short stories in Barrel Fever.

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