The Best of Me
(Little, Brown, $30) David Sedaris deserves a greatesthits collection as much as any writer, said Andrew Dansby in the Houston Chronicle. For 30 years, the humorist and his musings have been fixtures on public radio and best-seller lists, and in the pages of The New Yorker, and to see his choice of the best of his work over that time is to realize how clear and direct his writing has always been. “The pieces can be painfully funny and painfully poignant for the same reason: He’s economical with words, thoughts, jokes, and emotions.”
“The genius of The Best of Me is that it reveals the growth of a writer,” said Andrew Sean Greer in The New York Times. In his early pieces, Sedaris often found comedy in cruelty. The misanthropic newspaper critic he invented for 1997’s “Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol” hurls zingers even at the local elementary school Christmas
pageant, noting that the 6-year-old playing Mary “just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin.” When Sedaris first writes as himself, he’s almost as hilariously judgmental. But he says he chose the pieces here because they represent the kind of work he hoped to produce when he started writing at age 20, and by the time you reach the homestretch, “this book is all about his family and…all right, I’ll say it: love.” One of six children, Sedaris has always defined himself as a player in a serial family tragicomedy, and it’s “miraculous” to see how the early pieces help tell a story that only time would fully reveal.
Surprisingly, only four essays from Sedaris’ first three books appear here, said Heller McAlpin in CSMonitor.com. His breakthrough, about playing a Christmas elf at Macy’s, didn’t make the cut. But we get an important early glimpse of young David in 2011’s “Memory Laps,” which recalls fraught youth swim meets and “how his father’s constant dissatisfaction with him in and out of the pool both hurt and spurred him on.” The Sedaris family saga includes its share of heartbreak, but David winds up counting blessings. “Even his father, that perpetual human storm cloud, has finally, in his late 90s, acknowledged his elder son’s fantastic accomplishments.”