The Land and Its People Review by David Sedaris – Weirdness and Magic | David Sedaris

II will admit that my heart sank a little at the prospect of reading David Sedaris’s new volume of essays, some of which had previously been published in The New Yorker and which, compared with his previous output, seem to me increasingly hackneyed and reliant on anecdotes too weak for their weight. (From the essay Little America: “Few things make me crazier than people putting their feet on furniture.”) After nine previous volumes, Sedaris seems to be suffering from a problem that eventually afflicts all writers, and memoirists in particular, which is a dearth of usable material. What could be left in Sedaris’ backstory that the writer hasn’t already mined?

Well, as it turns out, there’s still a lot of usable stuff, plus some editors could have drawn a red line through it, though Sedaris, who has sold more than 16 million books, probably considers himself part of the post-editing elite. (I was reminded of this while reading a line from a profile of J. K. Rowling several years ago, in which Ian Parker wrote, in reference to The Casual Vacancy: “A few sentences make you imagine a little, Editor Brown starting to dial Rowling’s number, then slowly putting down the phone.”) And maybe it doesn’t matter; As long as Sedaris fans keep coming, whether for the books or the events, why mess with the formula? However, for less committed followers, reading Sedaris is a more complex experience than it once was.

The new collection contains 28 short pieces that Sedaris gleaned from everyday experiences with his husband, Hugh, his brothers and friends, while in New York, England, and on the road. He’s constantly touring, and as far as articles are concerned, this is where life comes into play for Sedaris, ensuring a certain amount of material generated from chats with drivers, fleeting interactions at airports, and general encounters with the funniest things with readers who came to see him. If the range is tight, Sedaris’ tone remains charming, even when it progresses to a grotesqueness that makes him sound like a gay Larry David. “I’m in the hard part of getting older—the part where everything bothers you,” he writes. No kidding, and if Curb Your Enthusiasm can get away with an episode dedicated to plastic packaging hell, Sedaris has a right to do something with furniture.

This means that when it’s good it’s still good. In his essay The Hem of His Garment, he writes about people “who aren’t in show business but are dazzling nonetheless,” and mentions support for Ann Richards, the late Texas governor (mother of the late Cecil Richards of Planned Parenthood), an example so random, so ridiculous, and yet so about money in this context that I laughed out loud. Other funny moments include Sedaris’ experience at an anti-Trump “No Kings” protest, where he found himself confused by his fellow protesters’ lack of focus. “Go to the protest now,” he writes, “and within seconds you look at the person next to you and think, “The globalization of the uprising? I thought we were here to defend the Masterpiece Theater!”“”

It’s low-hanging fruit, but I enjoyed the image of Sedaris looking around the protest in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and noting some of the aesthetic similarities between the “No Kings” protesters and the Tea Party dupes of Obama’s first term. Focusing on “a bearded man playing the accordion,” Sedaris wrote that the protesters seemed to be making “the worst possible advertisement for the Democratic Party: ‘Join us! We are dancing folk!”

Which brings us to what seems like the writer sometimes routinely adopts the grumpy old man trope. When he jokes and says “um” instead of “you motherfucker” or asks while describing someone “is it okay for you to say?” dark Is there more?” It’s so weak, so unfunny, so beneath Sedaris’ writerly stature that it provokes a real are-you-kidding-me moment. Sedaris is only 69; he lives in New York and Europe and travels the world constantly; this stuff for today’s kids is so out of touch with reality that it should have been scrapped.

Meanwhile, the strongest sections are not tracks about modern life, but observations about people, close to him or otherwise, in which Sedaris has always been at his smartest and strongest. If one feels a slight sense of ennui when opening another sentence with “My sister Amy,” writing about one’s mother is always deeply moving. In the Cool Mom article, a series of memories are triggered when he sees a woman in her 50s at the Denver airport wearing a T-shirt that says: “I’m not an ordinary mom, I’m a cool mom.” What follows is Sedaris at his best, proving that he can write about his family forever and never run dry: “Whatever our mother is to us, she is too complex and too important to fit on a sweatshirt. A person needs a whole mountain, and then some.”

It is these memories that take me back to his earlier books and remind me how enduring some of Sedaris’ images are: the time his mother and siblings locked him outside the house in the snow; The time I made him give Halloween candy to a loser who came in trick-or-treating on the wrong day. In the essay “Ashes,” from his second collection, “Naked,” there’s that account of her death, a beautifully written piece where his mother smokes and she thinks about her end and none of them know what to do.

Beneath the whimsy, there was always a brutal side to Sedaris, a more buried layer of emotions. In the same piece, Cool Mom, one sees where Sedaris’ writing voice comes from. Referring to the family culture in which he grew up, he writes: “There was nothing to ridicule him more than sincerity.” However, as with many professionals, the impression one gets of Sedaris after reading it is that he is someone who feels things deeply and is perhaps, essentially, an arrogant man. I love the piece about his oldest and closest friend, Dawn, who, he wrote, “dresses like a Swiss” and “smells like a cardboard box.” (I laughed out loud at that, too.) Or the bit where Sedaris learns of the death of a childhood friend he hasn’t seen or thought about in decades. “I’m 67 years old. This is my life, but it’s different now, and diminished, because Dan Thompson, who was there at the beginning of it and who made it worthwhile, is dead.”

In “A Long Way Home,” Sedaris and Hugh drive a stranger into town from Maine after their flight is cancelled, an account of a seven-hour car ride with a woman named Susan Doe that they find unduly moving. “Hugh and I, 10 blocks from our apartment, waited with the engine running until she was safely at the front door of her building and on her way to the elevator.” If these essays can seem slight at times, this is the moment when the strange effect of a fleeting encounter, like someone seen through a lighted window and always remembered for some reason, finds its perfect expression.