LGBT Book & Video Blog

VANESSA GRIGORIADIS writes in the NY Times:

Even if you disregard the van Gogh cover sketch of a skeleton smoking a cigarette, it’s difficult to miss that “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” is a book about David Sedaris’s midlife crisis. He was in his 30s when he was discovered by Ira Glass of NPR, and ever since he has presented himself as a childish genius perpetually late to the literary scene and forever mini-crisis prone. Even as he was transformed into publishing’s Dave Matthews — with four best sellers, endless paid lecture opportunities and 30-city tours — it’s taken his 50th birthday to alert Peter Pan to the onset of maturity. “I’ve been around for nearly half a century,” he moans, later adding, “In another 25 years I’ll be doddering, and 25 years after that I’ll be one of the figures haunting my Paris bedroom.” He tallies up the last 25 years, the prime of his life, and isn’t impressed by the sum: “How had 9,125 relatively uneventful days passed so quickly,” he writes, “and how can I keep it from happening again?”

As usual, Sedaris has lots of answers to the first question but not many to the second in this delightful compilation of essays circling the theme of death and dying, with nods to the French countryside, art collecting and feces. Assuming the book is nonfiction — Sedaris calls the events portrayed “realish,” and in a recent interview suggested his work was “97 percent ... true” — he has been passing the time in the fashion one imagines: lollygagging in Normandy feeding insects to spiders; neurotically managing a flock of chaffinches that have conspired to attack his windows; and plotting revenge on a rude airplane seatmate, in whose lap he has inadvertently spit a throat lozenge. There are sidesplitting essays here, like the baccalaureate address he gave at Princeton University in 2006 and a primer on masculine style that includes wearing an external catheter called the “Stadium Pal.” He even deigns to include a few “Naked”-era grotesques: a cussing neighbor who forces him to retrieve her dentures from a planter outside their building; a stinky baby sitter named Mrs. Peacock, who lies facedown on his parents’ bed while instructing the Sedaris kids to rake her with a back-scratcher; and a French ex-pedophile whom he befriends, in a sad, moving story, until his neighbors’ disapproval makes him ashamed.

It’s hard not to feel a tiny pang of regret as the family retreats into the background, replaced by Sedaris’s partner, Hugh Hamrick, a happy homemaker who has never provided the same comedic mileage. They are “two decent people, trapped in a rather dull play,” Sedaris admits. The main stage is occupied by a mix of highly pixelated memories, chance meetings with freaks and scenes of Sedaris fretting over his eventual demise. A punk-rock attitude toward death used to be a staple of Sedariana, one of many taboo subjects he enjoyed throwing in the face of the squares, like his crystal meth addiction. As a kid, he dug up the bodies of buried hamsters; as an adult, he studied an encyclopedia for forensic pathologists, decorated his apartment with taxidermy specimens and spent 10 days, including Halloween, in a medical examiner’s office on assignment for Esquire.

• More of this review - Up in Smoke
• More on When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedarisfirst Chapter: ‘When You Are Engulfed in Flames’ (June 15, 2008)
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames,' by David Sedaris: The Unexamined Life? He Never Heard of It (June 10, 2008)