I've only just completed David Sedaris' most recent book of short stories entitled When You Are Engulfed in Flames.
I'm a big fan of his. I can remember laughing - really laughing - at most of the brief essays in Naked or Barrel Fever, but this one left me a little cold.
I kept wondering if it was me or him that had lost something. Had I gotten too used to his cadences and rhythms? Had he become a victim (like so many artists) of the comfort brought with success? After all, comfort and happiness are to be desired in life, but in art they bring often meager rewards.
Whatever it was, most of the stories in When You Are Engulfed in Flames, while perfectly entertaining and droll, failed to really grab me and shake any emotions out of me - least of all the one I most wanted to find between its covers: amusement.
Most of the stories are rather contented domestic tales of life in a French villa. Only the novella length diary of Mr. Sedaris' attempts to quit smoking (which closes the book) really reaches the heights I was looking for. Maybe it is because that longish cycle of journal entries takes place largely in Japan that it comes off so well - nothing feeds the would-be chronicler of awkward moments like a foreign culture, and, it turns out, nothing is so sure to produce awkward moments as time spent trying to be an unobtrusive, effete, gay man in Japan.
In any case, in reading over this quick thumbnail review, I feel I've been too hard on this little book. If you like David Sedaris, you'll like it. It might not have the power to arrest you with freshness, as did some of his earlier collections, but it is like having dinner with an old friend who always tells funny stories - you might know their shape and the sorts of things your friend is likely to say or do, but that is part of the pleasure in the end.
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