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David Sedaris
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Little, Brown, and Company
Reviewed by Jane Keaton
  In his new book, Dress
your Family in Corduroy and Denim,
David Sedaris continues his investigation into who here is the animal
and who the zookeeper in this zoo we call life. We journey with him
through such dilemmas as how he, a gay teen, navigates strip poker at
an all-boy slumber party or, as a recovering drug addict, stands up to
the nine-year-old bully in his tenement.
These stories focus on Sedaris’ middle-class, suburban upbringing,
where both the rich and the poor are outsiders and the children are fed
on pop culture. Sedaris adds to this an unflinching exposure of the
basest human emotions, usually his own. When his father proposes buying
the family a vacation home, Sedaris imagines how “my classmates would
court me, hoping I might invite them for a weekend, and I would make a
game of pitting them against each other.”
Sedaris punctuates this variety show of prejudice, greed, and
humiliation with dark hyperboles sprung on the reader at the end of
otherwise innocuous statements. When their weary mother orders Sedaris
and his sisters out to play in the snow, “dusk approached, and as it
grew colder it occurred to us that we could possibly die.” This is the
kind of book where, when the author tells you, “on the fifth day of our
vacation my mother had a little breakdown,” you know he means it
clinically.
The
weavings and wanderings of Sedaris’ imagination are a delight. Strewn
through the book like pieces of ginger candy, they start out chewy and
sweet and finish hot as a jalapeno. As a condo-hunter vacationing in
Amsterdam, Sedaris falls head over heels for a certain upstairs
apartment. “[We] stopped to examine the movie-star portraits glued to
Anne Frank’s bedroom wall -- a wall that I personally would have
knocked down -- and I raced on to the bathroom, and then to the water
closet with its delft toilet bowl looking for all the world like a big
soup tureen”.
It’s this lively and unbridled imagination that keeps Sedaris from
full-fledged membership in his middle-class culture and pits him instead in
its audience, where he ruminates, criticizes, and throws tomatoes. The clincher is
that Sedaris is both a critic and a member of the cast, and so are
you. The book sneaks up and casts a mirror at you just when you’re convinced
you’re laughing at someone else.
But it’s also this imagination that fans the flame under Sedaris’s
fundamental empathy for his characters. Running below each narrative is a moral dividing line, disdaining greed,
hypocrisy, and cruelty and esteeming enthusiasm, imagination, and a desire
for love and belonging.
Sedaris’ love for humanity, no matter its distance
from grace, makes these stories sly and funny and heartbreaking as they pull
us in a tug-of-war between who we want to be and who we are.
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