David Sedaris: Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Reviewed by ELEANOR BLACK

It's usually a bad sign when a book's back cover tells you a writer is at the "peak of his power" and I can't believe the

publishers could not come up with something more original for American humorist David Sedaris, whose special talent for skewering the absurd in everyday life has turned him into a cult figure.

In this elegantly crafted collection of, frankly, twisted personal essays he recalls his North Carolina childhood, wasted 20s, and assorted weirdos he met along the way. Like all fine satirists, Sedaris dances a keen line between the comic and tragic. You may giggle at his reaction to the tough nine-year-old girl living next door in his apartment block (at 26 he is forced to move because she bullies him) but you also ache for a child whose mother is too busy working as a prostitute to care for her.

Sedaris' mother emerges as the source of some of his funniest moments. A woman who prefers napping on the couch to setting aside eight hours of night-time for sleep, she seems a breezy, oddly detached parent but she's tough as shoe leather. Her reaction when the hellcat nine-year-old calls her a bitch? "Sister, you don't know the half of it."

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is darker than Sedaris' best-known book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, in which he moves to Paris and takes French lessons. It is every bit as funny, but the melancholic vein runs deeper this time. The most touching chapter concerns the author's expulsion from home after dropping out of university for the second time, when his conservative father learns he is gay.

It is Sedaris' outsider's sensibility — growing up gay and Greek in Whitebread, USA — which gives his writing its unique power. He fears his newfound success (he packs auditoriums in the United States) will derail his comic sensibility. With a screwy worldview like his, there's no chance.