KEY POINTS:
David Sedaris is funny, no question about it. But is he as funny as he used to be? The US humorist has been making a living from publishing collections of essays since the 90s and is a regular in the New Yorker and on best-seller lists.
His latest work, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, covers familiar territory: tales of his eccentric middle-class family and his boyfriend Hugh Hamrick, sharp observations on American life, self-depreciating memoirs and celebrations of the frankly bizarre - the piece on the ultimate male accessory, The Stadium Pal, is a standout.
But the tone isn't as light as earlier books. Perhaps Sedaris' well of childhood memories is running dry. More likely Sedaris, 51, just started feeling his age. The drug- and alcohol-benders are far behind him, as are the dead-end jobs and he's discovered that being funny can't protect us from everything life throws our way.
His writing is less frivolous, more midlife crisis. A big chunk of the latest book, called The Smoking Section, is devoted to his bid to give up one of his final vices. He and Hugh move to Tokyo to go cold turkey on cigarettes. Sedaris writes about the process of tobacco withdrawal with honesty and clarity but strains to be truly funny. The same with The Man In The Hut, which tells of his contact with a sad, suspected child molester.
That's not to say the new book is a laugh-free zone, but I didn't find anything to equal my favourite passage from his 2000 best-seller, Me Talk Pretty One Day, where Sedaris catalogues the reasons he had trouble finding a boyfriend.
"Part of the problem," he writes, "had to do with my long list of standards. Potential boyfriends could not smoke Merit cigarettes, own a pair of cowboy boots or eat anything labelled either lite or heart smart. Speech was important, and disqualifying phrases included "I can't find my nipple ring" and "This one here was my first tattoo". All street names had to be said in full, meaning no "Fifty-ninth and Lex" and definitely no "Mad Ave".
"They couldn't drink more than I did, couldn't write poetry in notebooks and read it out loud to an audience of strangers, and couldn't use the worlds flick, freebie, cyberspace, progressive or zeitgeist.
"They could not consider the human scalp an appropriate place for self-expression, could not own a rainbow-striped flag, and could not say they had 'discovered' any shop or restaurant listed in the phone book."
- Detours, HoS
