David Sedaris’ ‘Calypso’ is hilarious
It’s always a joyful occasion when David Sedaris comes out with a new book of (probably embellished) stories from his madcap life.
Like his previous essay collections, “Calypso” is about place, or, more accurately, about the latest house he’s bought. While 2013’s rib-splitting “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls” focused on his permanent residence in rural England, “Calypso” brings him home to North Carolina and a town “so Southern that people will sometimes wave to you from inside their houses.”
Naturally, Mr. Sedaris reacquaints himself with the local fauna: fishermen in pro-gun Tshirts, fans of Christian rock (“the new kind, which says that Jesus is awesome”) and a vicious snapping turtle with a tumor on its head. The beach house, which he christens the Sea Section, becomes the go-to vacation spot for his siblings, in-laws and 90-something father.
In Mr. Sedaris’s recollections, each family member becomes as grand and colorful as characters in a Victorian novel, when they’re not playing straight man to his clever quips. But a shadow hangs over them: Their youngest sister, Tiffany, killed herself in 2013 after years of estrangement and bitterness.
“How could anyone purposefully leave us –– us of all people?” Mr. Sedaris wonders. “For though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost faith in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else.”
These essays are less zany than his earlier work (although you’ll still laugh out loud). Instead, he has mastered the art of modulation, weaving together grief with silliness, the joys of life with the fact of death. In “Sorry,” first published here, he revels in his obsession
with the children’s board game Sorry! while diagnosing his own inability to apologize. Now in his 60s, he must finally reckon with the kind of man he is.
That person, it turns out, is wonderfully unashamed. He writes candidly of his fascination with animal snuff films and his fight against a bowel-wrenching virus. He spends a small fortune on designer culottes. This is a liberal utterly immune to the liberal diseases: white guilt, class consciousness, heart hemorrhages. Even his views on same-sex marriage are heterodox.
Despite the tax advantages, he can’t bring himself to wed Hugh Hamrick, his boyfriend of decades and a rare pillar of reason in the frenetic Sedaris family. “The battle for gay marriage was, in essence, the fight to be as square as straight people ... like saying we’re all equally entitled to wear Dockers to the Olive Garden.” And David Sedaris is anything but square, anything but normal. He dreams of feeding his own noncanceroustumor to the snapping turtle and embarks on a quest to learn the dirtiest insult in everylanguage.
His best comedy is not only unserious but anti-serious, a vindication of frivolousness in a time of moral hand-wringing. When James Comey, former FBI director anda guy the Sedaris siblings “hated until someone we hated even more fired him,” rentsa place near the Sea Section, the whole family piles into a golf cart and rides back and forth in front of his house. They don’t catch sight ofhim.
“Oh well,” says one of his sisters. “It was fun to be excited for a while. Now we can all go back to doing nothing.”
If he sometimes comes off as flippant, so what. Mr. Sedaris is a prime entertainer, and so he cannot be a moralist. “Opinions constantly shifted and evolved, were fluid the same way thoughts were,” he writes of growing up with an alcoholic mother. The only constant, for him and for her, was the relentless pursuit of the right words, the right timing, the most thrilling joke. “The villain at 3 in the afternoon might be the hero by sunset. It was all just storytelling.”