David Sedaris’ latest collection of humorous essays, Calypso, isn’t up there among his best books but it’s not a bad read either.
The most impressive essays were on his sister Tiffany and mother Sharon. Not that they’re exploitative – Dave’s the celeb, not his immediate family (except for Amy, his actress sister) – though they are revelatory. Tiffany committed suicide in May 2013 just before her fiftieth birthday and Sedaris talks about her troubled relationship with the family, the squalid conditions she lived her and her mental problems.
Despite the fact that he, like the rest of his family, clearly didn’t get along with her, he remains tactful and respectfully sympathetic when writing about her. He’s not afraid to make himself look bad either, when he talks about (though he didn’t know it at the time) his final meeting with her when she showed up at one of his readings and he asked a security guard to shut the door on her. The gossip in me wanted to know more about Tiffany as he didn’t really reveal much of her personal life but I understand his choice to be somewhat reserved.
If you’ve been a long-time reader of Sedaris you’ll be familiar with all his family members, so it’s quite shocking to hear after so many books that his beloved and witty mother Sharon was an alcoholic who really fell apart once all her kids moved out. He explores his complicated feelings about why no-one in the family intervened on her destructive behaviour or why it was never addressed, even decades after her death from cancer. It was a fantastic piece.
But wait - isn’t Sedaris known for light-hearted, comedic stories? He is, those were the two serious parts of the book, I just thought they were also the best ones here. And unfortunately I didn’t find anything in the other stories all that funny. There was a bit about his Greek grandmother in The Silent Treatment that genuinely made me laugh though: "I remember Yiayia saying some pretty rough things about black people, which is odd given her limited vocabulary. It's like she took English lessons from a Klan member but quit after the second day."
Nor are any of the other stories that memorable or interesting. Sedaris buys a vacation house on the shores of Emerald Isle, North Carolina, for his family to use; he gets a Fitbit and becomes obsessed with walking; he and Amy go shopping for crazy clothes in Japan; he has a tumour cut off the side of his head by a fan/doctor that he plans to feed to a turtle; there’s a fox called Carol who lives in the Sussex countryside by his English house; he worries about shitting his pants; he thinks spirits are bunkum; he gets depressed over Trump’s election; and he gets mildly excited about Jim Comey vacationing nearby on Emerald Isle.
It’s really not that much. To be fair, a lot of Sedaris’ stories are that light and fluffy but they’re also usually entertaining and/or amusing, and too often I found myself sighing and wondering when the story would get good.
Still, David Sedaris has this very genial narrative voice that’s pleasant to read and his writing in Calypso is as artful as it’s ever been. And while there were some enjoyable essays and parts of others that were good, the book was full of too many forgettable, boring stories thin on substance to say it numbers as among his better efforts.
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