David Sedaris's essays about life in France and the various bruises he acquired from the language in "Me Talk Pretty One Day" have established him as a renowned comic and have sent his readers into ferocious bouts of laughter. However, Sedaris's most recent collection, "When You Are Engulfed in Flames," did not always have me rolling on the floor.
Readers of "The New Yorker" might be familiar with many of the pieces in this collection. They revisit the impeccable landscape of France: the food, the language, and the strange encounters Sedaris manages to collect. Hugh, Sedaris's partner of many years, makes frequent appearances and, as always, appears almost perfect. Hugh is an excellent cook, a wonderful host, and a levelheaded foil for his anxious partner's irrational fears and peccadilloes.
Despite the recurrent presence of Hugh and a variety of other characters, it is through David that the reader views the world. His eye is sharp, and his wit is often biting. Sedaris unflinchingly delves into the darkness of family and extracts the comedy?a strategy that has elicited some familial backlash. It is interesting to consider what inspires this approach to the world in Sedaris.
The shadows behind the comedy of his family are clear in some of his earlier work, but there are fewer anecdotes about the Sedaris family in this collection. I admit this was something of a relief. In his last collection, "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim," the essays were often hard to read. Making mincemeat of your family for laughs is ethically questionable and at times the reader felt implicated in the pleasure derived from the jabs at Sedaris's caricatured family.
This collection focuses more on Sedaris's own adventures. He relives and jokes about the time of shoddy apartments after college, coming out, and his various addictions in a candid, off-hand manner. The butt of the joke is more often Sedaris than not, and he seems to have developed an ability to view himself without the lens of his family.
Sedaris deals in punchy sentences and even the most grotesque scenes are described without fanfare. He clings to comedy, though he is capable of sentiment, and at moments his essays take a surprisingly moving turn.
The essays in "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" are fairly short, perhaps because they have made previous appearances in magazines. The triumph of the book is the final piece, "The Smoking Section," in which Sedaris travels to Tokyo to quit smoking. Cigarettes are almost as ubiquitous in Sedaris's work as laughs, and his riddance of the vice involves an abundance of hilarious exchanges. Sedaris hypothesizes that one needs to start fresh in order to eliminate a habit like smoking, but he speaks even less Japanese than he does French and turns out to be a particularly awful student. Though the earlier stories roused me to an occasional grin, it was only this last piece that had me chortling in public, wishing the story would never end.