Tuesday, May 3, 2011

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.

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