 |
 |
|
By David Sedaris Book Review By Daniel Harris Naked by David Sedaris, Boston, Little, Brown, and Co., 1997, 291 pages 
In his second short-story collection Naked, David Sedaris proves himself to be one of the country's leading humorists, high on the list with another chronicler of Middle America, Garrison Keillor.
Although both writers cover much of the same territory, focussing on the homey, humdrum, unheroic lives of Little People on Main Street, Keillor paints a wistful portrait of the mythic Minnesota village of Lake Woebegone, whereas Sedaris strips away the varnish of nostalgia from this barren tundra of Lutheran ministers and state fair bake-offs and boldly defaces Keillor's wry, yet sentimental representation of home-sweet-home.
Although Sedaris is in most respects the mirror opposite of Keillor, they both exhibit the same fascination with the banalities of lower-middle-class life and take enormous pleasure in self-deprecation, in depicting themselves as weak-willed Prufrocks who unabashedly celebrate their spinelessness and passivity. Naked also continues Sedaris's campaign against his own cuteness, the result of his pixyish voice, diminutive size, and, perhaps most importantly, his checkered resume, -- namely, his ill-fated tenure as a Macy's Christmas elf who quietly despised the fat women with screaming brats who peed on Santa's lap and barfed in Candyland.
Sedaris burlesques his boyishness by playing on the paradox of this leprechaun wielding a machete, this imp of the perverse whose characters spew forth breathtaking arias of obscenities.
A vicious gnome in the guise of a spritely gay effebe, Sedaris is the reigning poete maudit of the lewd and the tasteless and exhibits a real genius for vulgarity, gleefully savoring, in all of his cherubic innocence, the gamey flavors of his characters' indelicate speech. The book also provides a brilliant demonstration of the way the adolescent homosexual's maladjustment inspires fantasies and wish-fulfillments, his unhappiness goading him on to compensate for the sordid realities of his life by inventing from scratch the missing quotient of glamor. Naked is an hilarious exercise in homosexual self-mythopoesis. In "Chipped Beef," he imagines himself a member of a charmed dynasty of radiantly beautiful aristocrats; in "The Incomplete Quad," a privileged Ivy Leaguer whose roommates have monogrammed shoehorns; in "C.O.G.," a rabble-rousing trade unionist who is greeted on the convention floor with waves of thunderous applause and rhythmic chants of "Dav-id, Dav-id, Dav-id"; and in "The Drama Bug," an imminent Shakespearean who complains about his mother's squalid housekeeping: "perchance, fair lady, thou does think me unduly vexed by the sorrowful state of thine quarters. These foul specks, the evidence of life itself, have sullied not only thine shag-tempered mat but also thine character. Be ye mad, woman?" Sedaris's magnificent indulgence in make-believe shows how the gay day dreamer redresses his sense of social inferiority by surrounding himself with fictions, bathing himself in the glorious illusion of his society's admiration, thus preparing himself from the start for the life of the imagination that awaits him as an adult, now a professional dreamer with a full- time career as a writer, actor, decorator, or painter. The source of Sedaris's humor stems, not from the megalomaniac dreams of this elfin pygmy, this malevolent sylph with a sharp tongue and a raging hard-on, but from the constant deflation of his misplaced grandiosity, which is always collapsing before the unerring acumen of his slovenly mother, who brutally punctures her son's snobbish reveries. In Sedaris's fiction, the gay aesthete is invariably denied the opportunity to practice his aestheticism, his face is rubbed in the grubby, unromantic parochialism of Raleigh, North Carolina, and his preciosity is buried beneath an avalanche of banalities. Reading these stories is like watching a prissy queen dressed to the nines pick his way daintily through a busy genre scene by the Dutch artist Adriaen Brouwer whose crude, drunken peasants vomit beneath the tables and piss in full view of the other revellers. There in the middle of this raucous canvas is a haughty prig who cringes and quails at the possibility of soiling himself in the sty of Middle America, sniffing contemptuously at the bad taste of the inhabitants of trailer parks and nudist camps, clinging desperately to his imperilled dignity, every stitch of which is stripped from him by the end of this laceratingly self-analytic collection.
Daniel Harris is the author of The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture His email address is: DHarris@aol.com Courtesy of One Institute's International Gay & Lesbian Archives. |
© 1997-99 BEI