Review of David Sedaris' "When You Are Engulfed in Flames"

When sitting down to consider the overall experience that I had when reading a writer like David Sedaris, never would it have occurred to me that I would get to show off my knowledge of Eric Havelock or the Parry-Lord thesis. I’ll spare you the details, but I promise the central idea is important: people used to saying things do so much differently than people used to writing things, even when those two sets of things are exactly the same. The example that Parry, Lord, and Havelock were most to cite was Homer, arguably the best-known western writer of pre-literacy. They say that Homer communicates things in such a way that would be very different, and even unnecessary in a literate society, because he simply didn’t have this thing we call “writing.” 

Of course, the Parry-Lord thesis can quickly grow to be much more technically difficult than what I’ve said here, but the basic idea holds. When you’re reading something, the way you experience it is drastically different than from when you hear a raconteur “tell” it (especially a raconteur on the order of Homer). For about a decade, I’ve heard the occasional David Sedaris piece on NPR’s “This American Life” with host Ira Glass, who I imagine to be every bit as painfully awkward and borderline sociopathic as Sedaris is. I’ve never found Glass funny. He is what Philip Roth would have become had he taken up comedy, and one of the words that doesn’t come to mind when I think of Philip Roth is “comedian.” Sedaris, however, got the occasional chuckle out of me. I appreciate a sense of humor that’s off the beaten path, and his reflections on this or that – I somehow never seem to quite remember the content of his stories – did the trick. 

So, I found this in a used bookstore the other day for three dollars (yes, yes, I know it’s a hardback, but even at Goodwill hardbacks are going for three dollars these days), thinking that I would make up for all those times of passing him up in the New Yorker to look at the cartoons. I finished the book yesterday, and if hard-pressed to match the plots of the stories with their titles, I’m still not sure I’d be able to do it – maybe because they hardly ever have anything to do with one another. But I suppose my point is: I find the writing to be incredibly flat, overly indulgent, repetitive, and too autobiographical (if such a criticism can be made). You will hear endlessly that he lives in France, of his international travels, his long-suffering partner Hugh, et cetera. These are incessantly and grindingly shoved in your face, so much so that the book begins to lose the sense that it might have an audience.

The lack of interest in the stories on the page is probably attributable to Sedaris’ whiny, effete voice and overall stage presence. He just so much sounds the persnickety curmudgeon that he can’t help but be occasionally funny. His voice – both its physicality and tender faux sentimentality – are lost on the page. I suppose what I really found funny was his unashamed prissiness, his unmitigated misanthropy – both available, at least to me, only when I hear him reading his stories to a live audience. While even the prissiness and misanthropy can get old after a while, they never even struck me while simply reading him on the page. My reaction to this collection (at least as presented here, in book form)? Eh. I could really take it or leave it. In the future, I’ll probably do more of the latter.