Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
Little, Brown and Company

Almost no subject has escaped David Sedaris's cranky humorous gaze: his Greek-American family, employers, tourists, nudists, speech therapists, himself. In his last essay collection, titled, appropriately enough, "Naked," Sedaris wrote about being a compulsive light switch-licker as a child, volunteering in a mental institution and visiting a nudist colony. In his new collection of essays, "Me Talk Pretty One Day," Sedaris tells even more stories of his family and childhood, and includes several pieces on his adult life in New York and France, making "Me Talk Pretty One Day" something of a sequel to "Naked."

Here, for instance, Sedaris devotes more attention to his father, a misunderstood jazz lover and former IBM engineer who hides food in unlikely places, obsesses over his daughters' appearances and enjoys a relaxed relationship with his youngest son, Paul, a foul-mouthed blue-collar type who calls himself "The Rooster." Sister Amy Sedaris (who stars in Comedy Central's "Strangers With Candy" and sometimes performs with Sedaris as the "Talent Family") also appears more prominently, often becoming the center of attention, as she does in the essay "A Shiner Like a Diamond." At a photo shoot, she asks to be made up like someone who has been severely beaten, with the result that:

"Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what had happened, my sister smiled as brightly as possible, saying 'I'm in love. Can you believe it? I'm finally, totally in love, and I feel great.'"

It is the essays on France, and particularly on learning to speak French (the book's title comes from such a piece), that are the best in the book, providing Sedaris with opportunities for the witty asides he excels at, such as when he comments on American tourists' dress in Paris:

"Comfort has its place but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you've come to mow its lawns."

And for displaying his other gift, setting up bizarre tableaux:

"With practice, I will eventually realize my goal but, in the meantime, come to Paris and you will find me, headphones plugged in my external audio meatus, walking the quais and whispering, 'Has anything else been inserted into your anus? Has anything else been inserted into your anus?'"

To Sedaris, there is no difference between the absurd and the mundane. What supplies the humor in the subjects he chooses, instead of say, sentimentality or pathos, is the distorted view with which he takes in the world and everyone in it, including himself — Sedaris appears as peculiar, insecure and narcissistic as anyone else in these essays. What makes his work so engaging is the empathy and care with which he presents the people who populate his writing. People may be odd, and his writing might be satire, but Sedaris is never cruel in his portrayals.

If there is one flaw in this collection, it is that so many of these essays were written to be read aloud, and as anyone who has heard Sedaris read on NPR's "This American Life" knows, much of his humor rests in the delivery — a quality difficult to convey on the page, rendering merely amusing some essays like "The Youth in Asia," a piece that is side-splitting when performed. Yet overall, these essays are funny, very funny, and "Me Talk Pretty One Day," with its complex, witty and audacious humor shows off Sedaris's talents as a mordant satirist most enjoyably.

— Jessica Chapel (jnc at flakmag dot com)