A witty smorgasbord of human dysfunction

Happy-Go-Lucky David Sedaris Little, Brown £18.99

David Sedaris is a rare thing: an American author who has made enough money to buy not only a Picasso still life but the flat upstairs from his own (he and his boyfriend Hugh, an artist, call it ‘Luigi’s’, and he goes there when Hugh practises piano, to give the pianist some breathing space). He’s unabashed about his wealth, partly because it makes such a contrast with the ‘poverty and rejection’ of his 20s but also because it permits him to have unusual interactions with strangers.

In this new book of 18 autobiographical essays, for example, he meets a young female reader (above) of his who had studied French for six years but never been to Paris. On a generous impulse to provide a life-changing experience, he offers to pay for her ticket from the US. When she finally gets to Paris, she sends him an email from a cafe with a view of Notre-Dame, saying that she would give anything to be back in Reno, ‘drinking Jack Daniel’s with a pickle juice chaser’.

People hardly ever behave exactly as they should in Sedaris’s world, which is how he likes it: he’s unfazed – fascinated, even – by the smorgasbord of human dysfunction. He’s billed as a humourist, and the writing is funny, but in this book he again displays a deft and moving touch with troubling materials: his sister Tiffany’s mental illness and suicide; his dying father’s lifelong undermining of Sedaris and ‘inappropriate’ attitude to his sisters; the state of America after George Floyd was killed ‘and seemingly overnight all of New York came to smell like fresh plywood’.

Even as he skewers nuances and hypocrisies – his own and other people’s – there’s something refreshing about his coolly observant style in an age of increasingly feverish condemnation. Sedaris doesn’t want to cancel anyone, you see: he just wants us to stop and look at them.