Bloglette: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary

by David Sedaris

2010, Little, Brown & Company

I have read a lot of David Sedaris books. There was a time in my life when I virtually obsessed over his brand of wry personal essay. His writing, which undulates on the surface with a hilarious blend of sad-sack cynicism, contains a strong undercurrent of empathy for a wide swath of people and a fair amount of a particularly virulent brand of self-loathing that was quite well known to me. At one point, I was fairly convinced David Sedaris was the only man I could ever love.

So it was with delight, then, that I turned to Sedaris's first

work of published fiction in over fifteen years, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. This collection of stories shares very little in common with the acerbic, melancholic autobiographical essays we, his readers, have grown accustomed to. What it does share is the very kernel of what makes Sedaris so lovable: his seemingly endless supply of hilarity.

Sedaris deviates from his successful formula by regaling us with fable-like stories of anthropomorphized animals demonstrating the foibles of humanity, from its confusing quirks like internet dating to its inevitably vicious social constructs like wealth or gossip. The stories are brought to life by animals doing very human things, all of which are incredibly funny and more than a little bit dark.

My favorite story in the book is the one I heard first, at a reading he did last year at the Wang Center or the BSO in Boston. In the book, it's entitled "The Faithful Setter" and it is narrated by a dog who bickers with his wife about the taste of scented candles and about his career as a stud for breeding. "The Faithful Setter" is a perfect encapsulation of what works about this book: its seemingly blase (or occasionally naive) delivery of what Sedaris imagines to be the annoyances of daily life from an animal's perspective lays bare the inanities with which we, as people, occupy our lives with.

I read somewhere once (who can remember these things) that the best fiction is that which makes the world newly strange, and that is exactly what Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk does: introduces a world eerily inverted from our own that pokes hilarious fun at the way we conduct our lives, constantly enraptured by the sound of our own voices, unwilling to turn our gaze inward, and preoccupied disproportionately with trivial matters right up until the moment of our death.

It's funnier than it sounds, I swear it.

Bloglette: Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace

Consider the Lobster: Essays

by David Foster Wallace

2005, Little, Brown & Co.

Those of you who know me well are doubtless familiar with my slow-burning obsession with DFW of late. His essays, in particular, have proven fertile ground for the seedling of my infatuation to flourish into a wild post-modern fruit-bearing leafy-looking semiotic representation of a tree.

Consider the Lobster was the most recent of my forays into DFW land. I completed the book

several months ago and due to some moving silliness and personal shirking of self-imposed intellectual responsibilities (aka this blog) never wrote about it. As with all these bloglettes, too much time has passed for me to give an accurate reading of my impressions of the book except that I loved it.

Of particular note were an essay on the debate in the dictionary-writing community between

recording language as people speak it (descriptivists) and recording language as people should speak it (prescriptivists), an lengthy essay on John McCain's failed 2000 presidential bid that assumes that its audience of Rolling Stone-reading 20-something white guys were apathetic towards politics, and a beautifully sad and insightful article on the emotional consequences of Sept. 11th from the perspective of a (like me) highly conflicted American.

What sticks in my mind the most, though, is DFW's alarming ability to shift rhetorically to address the audience he is courting. His explication of the ins-and-outs of grammar snobbery, for example in the aforementioned article on American usage, professes gleefully to DFW's elitism in grammatical matters in order to sidle up along his readership, whereas his titular exploration of the morality of eating sentient food (namely, the lobster) downplays its end-goal of forcing the readers of Gourmet to re-think their position by evading its central moral question until the last few pages, masquerading its point as it were in a cleverly deceptive, nearly parodic description of the mania surrounding a lobster festival. (Hello, run-on, let's be friends.) After all, who could doubt DFW's seemingly impromptu questioning of the ethics of lobster bib-donning when he first describes in excruciatingly funny detail the tumult and buffoonery around him?

Now that I've ostensibly exhausted his nonfiction, you can look forward (if anyone can be said to do such a thing in reading this blog) to my turning an eye to his short fiction soon.

Bloglette: You Were Wrong

You Were Wrong

by Matthew Sharpe

2010, Bloomsbury

This is going to be a short entry, in part because I returned the book to the library and can't quote and in part because I read it a while ago (and as my computer has been broken for awhile, I've been relatively unable to blog).

You Were Wrong is a very funny, short love story about a high school math teacher who falls in love with his step-sister (unbeknownst to him, naturally). The main character is a buffoonish intellectual who has trouble process information at socially normal speeds. He lives in his dead mother's house with her last husband, an egocentric windbag whom our hero attempts, inexplicably, to kill.

Sharpe writes these incredibly precise little characters who are quite fun to read but then does little from the deus ex machina perspective with his creations. It's as though they are little wind-up toys that we spend three quarters of the book winding, only to watch them scramble about and get stuck on the carpet in its last act.

The plot is largely unimportant and is a little confusing, given how little of it there is.

Sharpe's prose is witty and, well, sharp. He often made me laugh out loud. The dialogue is verbose but its verbosity and the reader's subsequent entanglement in it are delightful in the same way it is to watch Donald O'Connor do a pratfall.