Atmospheric Disturbances

“Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.”

         So begins the short-story-seamstress Rivka Galchen’s debut novel. “Atmospheric Disturbances” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) tells the story of Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist whose wife has disappeared and been replaced by a double, sending him on a quest to find her and a missing patient, Harvey, who believes himself to be a secret agent working for the Royal Academy of Meteorology. Galchen lets her protagonist create an imposter wife, a simulacrum, for it is through this absurd filter that he can analyze his marriage. The minute to omniscient emotional intricacies of a lengthy relationship are investigated through such an original perspective and by such a strong talent that the novel has been called everything from “witty and tender” to “erudite and chock-full of heartache.”As the writer-daughter of one meteorologist and one computer programmer, Galchen succeeds in her personal quest to unite the oft considered separate disciplines of the sciences and the humanities. This book looks at love (and weather) from a very human perspective. Local psychological movements propel the narrative, but the book works as a microcosm because of the presence of weather (and love), two universal elements.
         At the novel’s open, the reader watches the initial meeting between Leo and the woman he’s convinced is a double sent home in place of his wife. He senses the switch immediately—the simulacrum brought home a dog, something the real Rema would never do— and passively rejects her. He recognizes his wife’s cornsilk blonde hair, her baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, even the way in which she unzips her boots, but he’s sure this isn’t his wife. “It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew. Like the moment near the end of a dream when I am sometimes able to whisper to myself, ‘I am dreaming,’” he explains. It is evident, though, that his rejection stems from adoration, from a loyalty to his wife. In moments of weakness he even lays kisses on the simulcrum’s wrists and feet, remnants of the woman he loves. Professionally, Dr. Liebenstein is occupied by Harvey. Harvey suffers from, among other things, a heightened sense of relevancy. He is convinced of his ability to control weather phenomena and that the Royal Academy of Meteorology is sending him secret messages through page six of the New York Post. These messages often contain orders which send Harvey throughout the country on various meteorological missions, resulting in a high frequency of disappearance. Searching for a treatment instead of a cure, Leo succumbs to the simularcum’s tremendously unethical suggestion that he pretend to also be an agent for the Academy. This practice isn’t unheard of. In fact, it wasn’t always considered unethical. Psychiatrists of the 1960s and 70s would commonly engage in a patient’s delusional reality in order to make some sort of alliance. Perhaps fittingly, there was also once shared a belief that all of those who care for the mentally ill become so themselves.
         Leo is a character of droll tragedy. Having lost, over time, the strongest love his has known, he seems caught in the eye of heartache, searching and grasping through a wayward fog of delusion. The winds of confused longing carry Leo out of office and across the South American continent in search of Rema. Just like Esther Greenwood’s descent into mental illness, Leo’s slide is convincing. But it is also unique, this because Galchen tricks us. Good readers will pick up on hints intimating Leo’s psychological deterioration (in case a transcontinental search for his real wife isn’t proof enough) and may even pat themselves on the back; but we’re hesitant to come to any conclusion regarding Leo’s sanity because he uses the techniques of his profession to not only identify the very same traits we’ve come to notice, but also justify his insane logic. A second reading gives seemingly mundane character observations new life. Early in the novel, when discussing Rema, Leo says that “she’d been inflicted by a very American idea of identity, to think that who you were mostly consisted of what you did to get paid — that seemed silly to me.” He - a psychiatrist losing his mind.
         This relationship between writing the human character and professional study is a practice championed by Galchen, whom, like Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, attended medical school, taking all of her electives in psychiatry. The work of her late father, Tzvi, a professor of mesoscale meteorology, is directly quoted throughout the work. She quiet brilliantly captures the hidden poetry in scientific language, which is haunted by history and incidental allusions. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Galchen said, “I wanted the narrator of my novel to co-opt the rhythm, the cadence, the vocabulary of science, even as he so obviously misappropriates them to whatever purpose suits his emotional needs.” Fans of language in general will find delicious bits of humor throughout (in one such instance she introduces the term ‘dopplerganger effect,’ a pitch-perfect play on doppler radar).
         Leo’s investigation leads him to the enigmatic guidance of the meteorologist Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, the secret workings of the Royal Academy of Meteorology and their cosmic conflict with the 49 Quantum Fathers—a rouge agency with the worst intentions—and the, ahem, heightened sense of relevancy which leads him to consider the possibility that he, or Rema, or Harvey might lie at the center of all of this.
         Part of the reason this novel works so well is that balance Leo maintains, walking the border between logical and mindless. There’s a quote from Aristotle often mistranslated to mean “Philosophy begins in wonder,” but a better translation reads as, “Philosophy begins in the uncanny.” This suggests that philosophy begins at the moment when what you think you know as truth becomes a little less stable. Is Leo crazy, or is he just married? Because that’s what this novel really is, behind all of the science and unfathomables, it’s a novel about the nature of marriage. It’s about how people change over time, about how the participants in a long relationship can lose track of the sense that they're both dynamic and slowly chip away at themselves, hoping for a lasting, comfortable fit. And this is what makes meteorology an ideal metaphor for love; it is unpredictable and, essentially, unreadable. If we can’t read the weather, in all of its blunt honesty, how can we continue to feed the delusion that we could ever completely know another person? Like a surrealist painter, Rivka Galchen’s work seems absurd until you recognize that it takes root in something very concrete. This book will influence, whether you realize it or not. It’s the sort of story which you’ll come to realize reads you even more than you read it. This is the perfect book for hurricane season.

P.S. Hey, lazy writers, just because the 49 Quantum Fathers sort of reminds you of Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49", the comparison isn’t necessary. In fact, the group was almost the 39 Quantum Fathers, originally a reference to Hitchcock’s “The 39 steps.”

P.P.S. If this read like a love letter, well, I mean, seriously:

Tree of Smoke

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me. - William “Skip” Sands

         The star of Denis Johnson’s latest novel, the Vietnam war, is displayed at once as a brutal epic without hero and a stagnant place; a physical place, but also a place in the minds of those affected, a place for which nothing had prepared them. “Tree of Smoke” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) is a massive medley of characters and chronicles that converge and fall away. The 614 page masterwork demands contradiction. It is somehow a fleeting behemoth.
         “Tree of Smoke” is a study of absolute depths. Johnson seems to suggest war as a tool of the universe, a universe hostile to human existence. The novel is soaked in loss, fear, and an eventual numbness within wherewithal, as if last nerves have been hit with Xylocaine. Sadness reigns over this giant book, though the senses are so exercised by such lyrical and vibrant language that the pages leaf by. The story is seen through a kaleidoscope, through the eyes of three central characters and their innumerable satellites spanning the years between 1963 and 1970 with a postlude set in 1983. William “Skip” Sands is a greenhorn member of the C.I.A, influenced by and entangled in the legend of his rouge Uncle, the Kurtz-like former POW known to many simply as the Colonel, a man of prowess and danger, built of myth and bravado. The book also follows Bill and younger brother James Houston out of the Arizona desert and into the jungles of Southern Asia. James is willingly ripped from the high-school youth he knew and tossed into a war without rules, without hope, a moral black-hole.
         Multiple reviews of this book by those much more talented than I evoke the name Dostoevsky when discussing this author’s passion, or Poe when fear be the focus. Of Johnson, Vince Passaro said, “We can hear Twain in his bitter irony, Whitman in his erotic excess.” Johnson writes of fear so convincingly that he seems to be a connoisseur of the emotion.
         This of James Houston: “They assigned him to Vietnam. He knew it meant he was dead. He hadn’t applied, hadn’t even asked how you apply, they’d just handed him his fate. Four days out of basic, here he carried his lunch toward a table in the enlisted mess, the steamy odor of reconstituted mashed potatoes rising toward his face, and his legs felt like rubber as he stepped toward a future scattered with booby traps and land mines; they’d be on patrol and in front and he’d step on something that would just rip the veins right out of him, splash him around like paint—before the noise hit his ears, his ears would be shredded—you just, probably, hear the tiniest beginning of a little hiss.”
         In this war innocence is obliterated. The young Skip Sands of 1965 believes in the American involvement. He believes in a war that can be won. “At the sight of the flag Skip tasted tears in his throat. In the Stars and Stripes all the passions of his life coalesced to produce the ache with which he loved the United States of America—with which he loved the dirty, plain, honest faces of GIs in the photographs of World War Two, with which he loved the sheets of rain rippling across the green playing field toward the end of the school year, with which he cherished the sense-memories of his childhood...the stunned streets of breezeless afternoons...the whirring of redwing blackbirds, the sadness of the grown-ups at their incomprehensible pursuits...His love for his country, his homeland, was a love for the United States of America in the summertime.” This Skip Sands will not make it out of the war’s heavy darkness. He eventually devolves to nothing more than a self-proclaimed Ugly, Fucking American.
         Like Stephen Crane, Johnson writes brilliantly of the scattered senses of a youth in the face of first battle. Under fire, James Houston “asked, am I moving? The dark was thick enough to drink and streaked with the afterimages of tracers and muzzle-flash. Now it was quiet. Not even a bug droning. In such unprecedented silence James could tell just from the tiny sound his clip made as the sling ticked against it that the clip was empty, whereas only two minutes ago the surrounding noise had been so magnificent he couldn’t hear his own screaming. In this new silence he didn’t want to replace the clip for fear all the senses of the enemy would lock on to the sound and he’d be shredded, shredded, shredded.”
         Unfortunately, because of the large number of characters, it takes a very close reader to follow each relationship and the plot which unfolds beneath them. It is as easy to find yourself lost in this novel as I suspect it would be in the Vietcong tunnels. The plot is huge and arduous. Perhaps this was intentional. Perhaps the free-flowing haze of a plot accentuates a deeper theme Johnson is trying to convey throughout the book— Desolation breeds delusion.
         A constant current running through the Book of Johnson is the human inability to completely understand, or rather the lack of a final truth. “There shall be blood and fire and palm trees of smoke – from Joel, wasn’t it?” Johnson writes. “Incredible how the English came back. And the scripture, too, back from the darkness. Joel, yes, the second chapter, usually translated ‘pillars of smoke,’ but the original Hebrew said ‘palm trees of smoke.’ ” When scripture is recognized as flawed (or the interpretation, anyway) what must that say of the human situation and our distance from any firm resolution? Johnson champions the angle of the individual. When isolated in war, in Hell, previously accepted reality melts and perception is left. Beneath the heavy shadow of dense prose, the characters are lost in their own specific existence. Because of this we see with them (even before them) that they all share the same thing: Death. Death may have a different meaning to each man, but what they are left with after years of sweating bullets, constantly surrounded by agony, doesn’t resemble any life they have ever known or thought possible. Wrapped in all of it, all of the emptiness, young James Houston refuses to return home to his mother because “her zealous hope of heaven made it hell there.”
         Despite the occasional highs and the continuous chilling low, the book isn’t always set to overdrive. Johnson, like any great writer, can find beauty in the banal. This is Skip Sands enjoying breakfast at a bowling alley. “Despite the general noise there was a kind of tiptoe stealth in the approach of some of these athletes, a stalking, bird-dog concentration. Others lumbered to the line and flung like shot-putters. Skip had never bowled, never before this moment even observed. The appeal was obvious, the cleanly geometry, the assurances of physical ballistics, the organic richness of the wooden lanes and the mute servitude of the machines that raised the pins and swept away the fallen, above all the powerlessness and suspense, the ball held, the ball directed, the ball traveling away like a son, beyond hope of influence. A slow, large, powerful game.”
         Kathy Jones, a World Children’s Service worker and acquaintance of Skip Sands, is a minor character who falls from grace as quickly as any of the military men. “In these damp nights the temperature of human breath she felt a moldering and sleepy grief born, she was convince, of self infatuation—a slow, hot , tropical self-pity.” writes Johnson, “She needed to turn outward, to find others, she needed her duties in the countryside. Or she’d sink. Rot in the underneath. Be devoured by this land. Flower up as new violence and despair.”
         This novel is of daunting size, but once the coda sets in and the pages slip by, you will find yourself wishing it were longer. Johnson is among the largest, brightest moons to have risen over literature in some years. He should feel at home in the sky, for it is the only limit to his potential. As Jim Lewis for the New York Times put it, “We very badly need more novelists who can write this well.”

Excuse for poor review: I was packing.
Segues are overrated anyway.

No One Belongs Here More Than You

A professional disclaimer: I finished this book over a week ago and kept putting off a review. In the meantime, the relationship between Me and It has grown thin, the equivalent of an occasion-based friendship, I suppose, which is why I’ll rely heavily on samples. Though, in this case, I think it might prove to be for the better anyway.

         Like “Me You and Everyone We Know,” a Caméra d'Or winning film starring and written by Miranda July, her debut collection of short fiction searches for connection in the most offbeat places. The subject matter within “No One Belongs Here More Than You” (Scribner, 2007) ranges from a geriatric swim class without a pool to a virgin’s desperate slide into the world of peepshows. July is a quirky author who manages to avoid being trite, a rare feat.
         The stories are unified by a confident voice, a voice perhaps defined by an innocence of language, an honest language. Her narrative psyche is consistent and interesting enough to hold attention through sixteen stories, most of which are complete and satisfying. Her pedestrian diction is rolling and easy, it allows for a certain comfort in the absurd. What follows is the opening of a story entitled ‘It Was Romance.’ “This is how we are different from other animals, she said. But keep your eyes open so you can see the cloth. We all had white cloth napkins over our faces, and the light glowed through them. It seemed brighter under there, as if the cloth actually filtered out the darkness that was in the rest of the room—the dark rays that come off things and people. The instructor walked around as she talked so that she was everywhere at once. Her face and permed hair were forgotten; there was just the voice and the white light, and these two things combined felt like the truth.”
         July recognizes her characters’ philosophical limits as well as her own as a writer. In ‘Making Love in 2003,’ a story featuring Madeleine L’Engle which feels as if culled from actual experience, she flirts with existentialism. “How does anyone ever let go of anything? My book was a long glove clasping the dark shape I had loved. Inside the glove was one very pale young hand that had never learned to grip skin. It was so raw it looked wet. I fell into the eyes of every person I passed on the street. Food seemed impossibly strange. Children thought I was a child and tried to play with me, but I could neither play nor work, I could only wonder why. Why do people live at all?”
         There is an aesthetic distance to these stories—we recognize them as art. Although her style is convincing, we rarely completely identify with these characters and situations, which is fine. A widespread discussion in the field of literature is whether a work should be judged based on what it is or what it does. This collection succeeds on both levels, but the former more so. Despite an almost constant sense of voyeurism, the reader is taken by the hand and introduced to July’s world of cringe-inducing encounters and frank sentiment. Though, there are flashes of familiarity, particularly in private thought, which give the characters flesh. I offer an example from the story ‘The Sister,’ in which a lonely man anxiously awaits his first meeting with a possible love. “The bar was full of smoke and men, but I could see her, behind someone, just out of view, in tight jeans and tennis shoes, chewing gum, with pierced ears and some kind of band holding her hair back. A ribbon or some kind of plastic band. And pierced ears. I said that already.” Her use of repetition and immediate, embarrassed correction emphasizes the elderly man’s anticipation. Again, within the same story, the repetitive technique is utilized, but this time to a lesser degree. “I had never been in love, I had been a peaceful man, but now I was caught in agitation. I accidently hurt myself with my own body, as if I were two clumsy people fighting. I held on to some things too tightly, ripping pages as I turned them, and let go of other things too suddenly, plates, breaking them. Victor sat with me at lunch all week and tried to interest me in things that were not interesting.” This isn’t the first time the narrator has mentioned that he had never before been in love, and July continues to convey the man’s fixation on this mysterious woman through his disinterest in anything else.
         These vignettes run the gamut of identity. There is light in the book (the common language certainly does something to soften the often harsh blows), but lonesomeness and abstracted characters predominantly fill the collection. The quite brief ‘This Person’ opens with a description of a “somebody somewhere” and quickly sharpens to an individual point, until, after only three pages and a few lines, the reader is suffocated by intimate knowledge of the subject. “This person mourns the fact that she has ruined her one chance to be loved by everyone; as this person climbs into bed, the weight of this tragedy seems to bear down upon this person’s chest. And it is a comforting weight, almost human in heft.”
         This collection won’t bowl you over, July isn’t quite Flannery O’Connor. On occasion she loses her edge and it becomes evident that she is trying to create art by way of the irreverent, an exercise which begs for the cry of pretentious. But most of the time July is funny and penetrating. She can be both heartbreaking and inspiring. In his bit of praise printed on the inside cover of the paperback edition, George Saunders coined the phrase ‘July-esque,’ which seems entirely appropriate, as there are sure to be imitators.

Netherland

“With echoes of The Great Gatsby, Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel, Netherland, provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream.” - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Exquisitely written...one of the most remarkable post-colonial novels I have ever read.” - James Wood, The New Yorker

“Many have tried to write a great American novel. Joseph O'Neill has succeeded.” - Joseph O'Connor

“A dense, intelligent novel.” - Publisher’s Weekly

“Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read.” - Jonathan Safran Foer

“I devoured it in three thirsty gulps.”
- Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

         F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, his great American novel, is a sacrosanct work of literature in the English language. Few dare toy with such comparisons, for one would immediately question the critic’s palate (and perhaps sanity). When I read the initial wave of compliment Joseph O'Neill's latest, "Neterland" (Pantheon, 2008), received, I thought it impossible to ignore. Critics across the country were dropping Gatsby like the name of a famous friend. Madness, right?
         While Fitzgerald, like Nick Carraway, idolized the opulence of the 1920s, he was uncomfortable with the unrestrained materialism and declining morality which saturated the decade. Joseph O’Neill, born Irish and raised primarily in Holland, manages a similar rapport with his narrator, Hans. Hans van den Broek is an indecisive equities analyst of similar breed living in New York City. Hans, his British-born wife Rachel, and their son Jake, lived in a mod TriBeCa loft until the events of 9/11 forced their family further up town. O’Neill uses the characters and events around Hans to at once exhibit the intricacies of a faltering marriage and reveal an unassuming sub-culture of cricket players embedded in the new Big Apple, a city at heart stricken with paranoia and anger in the immediate post-9/11 world. Though, the book is not merely bi-lateral. “Netherland” is a capacious novel, holding everything.
         Like Fitzgerald, the vocabulary often sways toward decadence. The comparison even proves apt in character to space relationships. The way in which Hans’ wife, Rachel, moves about their Hotel Chelsea apartment carries whispered memories of Daisy Buchanan floating through the family mansion. “Her fingers were cool and limp. “Oh, Hans,” Rachel said. Her face wrinkled and she cried briefly. Then she wiped her nose and neatly swung her legs out of bed and went quickly to the bathroom: she is a helplessly brisk woman. I removed my coat and sat down on the floor, my back resting against the wall. I listened intently: she was splashing running water over her face and brushing her teeth. She returned and sat in the corner armchair, clutching her legs to her chest. She had a speech of her own to give.”
         In writing about a character emotionally constrained, O’Neill lets the life of Hans loom large in scope. There is an often discussed scene in this work featuring Hans, his distant son, and Google Earth. Of the moment, Dwight Garner for The New York Times wrote that it is “among the most moving set pieces I’ve read in a recent novel.” The scene captures the quality of tragic limitations within a marriage fractured, split ocean wide by a trial separation. There immediately develops a sympathy with the ache of this removed father in his moment of desperation, a desperation to recognize something familiar about his family across the Atlantic, even if it only be an inflatable pool viewed from many thousand feet above. I feel compelled to share this bit, but I’ll save it for you. The segment is paced perfectly and wouldn’t shine as brightly out of context.
         Despite the combination of passive-aggressive abuse and volcanic diatribes, it never feels as if the marriage is completely lost. These characters are surprisingly mature; surprising because of the swath of eccentricities alive in contemporary literature. The separation oddly feels both uncomfortable and completely appropriate. This works perhaps because of Rachel’s maternal ethics and Hans’ desire to remain a good guy. His is an active desire, one of which all good guys could tell of.
         While visiting his wife and son in England, Hans overhears Rachel discussing their marriage with her father. It is then that he is alerted to the possibility of some clandestine preexistent injuries in Rachel which may also be contributing to their downfall, that maybe it isn’t completely his fault. Here O’Neill displays his mastery of the long sentence and Hans’ lofty realm of thought.“I concluded, feverishly, that here was a development— an unknown hinterland to our marriage which, if jointly and equally explored, might lead to discoveries that would change everything; and the prospect filled me with a theorist’s lunatic excitement and those daydreams of room service and afternoons gobbling blackberries and pineapple slices while we navigated the uncharted reaches of our psyches.”
         As mentioned, the book, though towering over its peers, is of the post-9/11 lot. The restraint I’m certain O’Neill exercised is worth applause. Most statements of a political nature, certainly the leftist sentiments, are reserved for Rachel who uses them to defend her determination to raise Jake outside America. “You want Jake to grow up with an American perspective,” she asks Hans, “...you want him to believe that Saddam Hussein sent those planes into the Towers?” Hans thinks himself to be a political dimwit, made uncomfortable by his inability to join the most common conversation since the attack, so soapbox symposiums are averted.
         The single constant throughout the history of Hans is cricket, a bat and ball sport known to most outside the United States. Some of O’Neill’s most impassioned prose is inspired by the sport. It is over this shared passion which Hans begins his ambivalent friendship with the Gatsbyesque Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck is a charismatic, charming and shadowy Trinidadian business man who hopes to re-introduce the game of cricket to America. “I say we must claim our rightful place in this wonderful country. Cricket has a long history in the United States, actually. Benjamin Franklin himself was a cricket man,” Chuck explains to those having just finished a game at the second rate Walker Park facilities. The pairing of Chuck Ramkissoon and Hans van den Broek, a self-described “man to whom an apology of almost any kind is acceptable,” allows for a brilliant journey through an “other” New York, a New York of immigrants and dreamers of every nationality. Chuck speaks with a casual passion, indefatigably, virtuosically. “He likes nothing better than to put his bare feet on the dashboard and hit me with an aphorism or a fact,” says Hans of Chuck. Chuck Ramkissoon is an enigma to be met face to page, so here I digress.
         "Netherland" doesn’t turn on plot. Rachel, thinking in terms of the grand narrative, questions “the whole story” of their marriage. The Chuck Ramkissoon saga is a study of character and unprecedented interaction. Although I discussed them almost separately, Rachel and Chuck, Love and Friendship, Fear and Loyalty all exist together throughout this brilliant novel.
         “Netherland” is an absolute example of sweeping talent. O’Neill delivers a virtuoso performance and his voice, like the maimed metropolis he so clearly adores, will not slumber.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames

         There is a fundamental flaw built into the memoirist. For someone to be considered as such, they have probably written multiple books about themselves. On each subsequent release, then, arises the question, why was this left out the first time? A family’s quirks can become far too familiar too quickly for a writer to carry on about them through five collections. Which is why we can be thankful for the legitimately talented. Please, gentlemen, say hello once more to Mr. David Sedaris.
         Mr. Sedaris’ books, starting with “Barrel Fever” (1994), have been translated into 25 languages and he has graced the New York Times best-seller list four times with a probable fifth trip by the end of this month. With his latest, “When You Are Engulfed In Flames” (Little Brown, 2008), Sedaris has savingly stepped outside the time frames he has so successfully worked within for past essays. While David mined the same set of years for the material included in “Naked” (1997), “Me Talk Pretty One Day” (2000), and “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” (2004), he felt the need to beat a fresh horse this time around the track. In this new collection of first person essays, among other things, David discusses buying pot from a trailer-dwelling couple in North Carolina over the holidays, an ornery pseudo land lady with a crush on his widowed father, how Bob Dylan and Donna Summer can save you from a Hitchcockian chaffinch attack, and the “number one reason not to blow a horse in your bedroom,” most of which takes place after the period spent in Normandy, detailed in Me Talk Pretty.
         Even with a ripe period from which to pull, many familiar characters recur. David’s father appears, as does his mother (briefly), his boyfriend and professional set designer, Hugh Hamrick, and sister Amy, of “Strangers With Candy” fame, who offers the number one reason alluded to above: the inevitable muddy carpet. Also within Flames can be found David’s own devilishly deadpan prose and, yes, the occasional exaggeration. The New York Times, a fine publication, recently brought to my attention an essay published by The New Republic, a once fine publication, entitled “This American Lie.” The author, Alex Heard, questioned the validity of some of David’s essays included in “Naked.” An authors note in Flames describes the events discussed as “realish.” As I see it, a memoir should be allowed some breathing room, otherwise, it would be called an auto-biography. In a new essay, ‘Memento Mori,’ David recalls a conversation of sorts he had with a 300 year old skeleton who continues to remind him of his impending doom. While I was sitting on my front porch, reading this book, I admittedly began to doubt the existence of a character, but just for a moment. The essay which seemed beyond reality is called ‘This Old House.’ In it, David writes of “an arthritic psychic, a ramshackle house, and either two or four crazy people, depending on your tolerance for hats.” Just as I cast a curious eye at the schizophrenic Chaz, I kid you not, a pink golf cart filled with middle-aged women scooted past my house. Quite simply, sometimes the absurd occurs, and David is always there to capture it. I suspect Heard thought up a clever essay title and just ran with it (Sedaris is a somewhat regular contributor to National Public Radio’s “This American Life”).
         What appears to be an initial series of stumbles, the first few essays are actually quite well poised. First time readers are introduced to Mr. Sedaris, a man fascinated by the silly, sincere, and borderline disgusting. Most of all, they’re introduced to a writer’s writer. David’s sentences have grown more slender. Unnecessary words are few and far between. In a similar scope, his comedic timing has become more acute. Unexpected daggers of humor line single sentences. He’s one of the world’s foremost comic writers, yet he still manages to slip a punch-line in under your nose. But that’s not to say his pace is skewed. I’m not sure where the praise should appropriately fall, on the author or his editor, but the collection is well paced. The majority of the book is full of short essays which land like quick jabs. Eventually, tempo slows and the reader comes upon perhaps the longest essay in the Sedaris cannon, ‘The Smoking Section,’ an account of his attempt to quit smoking. On “The Daily Show,” David referred to what is discussed in the book as “the Japanese method,” which is essentially a $23,000 vacation in Tokyo. It’s not that humor fades from this last essay, but, considering the essay is a bit drawn out, the laughs accept a supporting role. Though, in some spots, the comedy reaches that rare summit where the goofy and masterful meet. “I was in El Paso one afternoon, changing out of my swimsuit, and a young man said, “Excuse me, but aren’t you...” When I say I was changing out of my swimsuit, I mean that I had nothing on. No socks, no T-shirt. My underpants were in my hand. I guess the guy recognized me from my jacket photo. The full-length naked one on the back cover of my braille editions.”
         Some (ahem, Times) may suggest that this work lacks the enlightened reflection which appeared in flashes through Dress Your Family. With that I must disagree. Rather than completely cleansing his recent essays of thick sincerity, David covers it delicately with the light-hearted shawl he has spent the last sixteen years weaving. In one essay, David discusses an old man he initially befriended in spite of popular community opinion . The man, who was recently excited by an increase in his train travel discount to seventy-five percent as a result of a hip replacement, was eventually diagnosed with a terminal cancer. David learns of this three years after their last discussion, at which point I share this excerpt: “I saw him on his front stoop a week before he died, and when I waved he beckoned me inside the gate and we shook hands one last time. I found myself wondering if the cancer had upped his train discount, bumped it from seventy-five percent to something even higher, but it’s a hard question to ask when you’re not fluent. And I wouldn’t want him to take it the wrong way.” That last line aches with sagacity! Once you’ve read the essay yourself, learned of the old man and their peculiar relationship, you’ll understand completely.
         This book is a must-read for 2008. Though, once you do, try to avoid comparing it to his other works and enjoy it for what it is: a satisfying step in the right direction. I must borrow from John Stewart, as he said it best, “The book is phenomenal, if you like joy.”