Review by New York Times Review
Holiday essays from David Sedaris. ALONG with watching clips from "The Daily Show" on YouTube and eating organic vegetables lugged home in reusable canvas sacks, having a shelf full of books by David Sedaris has become a requisite part of American middle-aged, uppermiddle-class urban life. Thousands people buy them, according to this very newspaper's best-seller list. So why do I suspect few have actually read them, cover to vaguely macabre Chip Kidd-designed cover? Maybe because it's so easy just to dabble in David Sedaris. His pieces are often broadcast on "This American Life," to which he is a regular contributor (imagine the yards of Prius upholstery ruined as his many fans snort latte out their noses, convulsed by his aperçus). Others are printed in The New Yorker, trailing a faint whiff of the exotic: Sedaris was raised in suburban North Carolina but has long lived in and worked from France, like some post-World War I expatriate daubing at a canvas. He draws enormous, worshipful crowds to his performances and has also written plays, some with his sister Amy (best known for her role as Jerri Blank on the late, lamented Comedy Central program "Strangers With Candy" and for churning out cheese balls in copious numbers from her West Village apartment). Still, it's David's half-dozen essay and story collections that have fixed him in the public imagination, at almost 52, as the country's pre-eminent humorist - that starchy, unfunny word. Back in 1997, before he was quite the blockbuster draw he is now, his publisher released a Christmas-themed collection called "Holidays on Ice" that included Sedaris's seminal "SantaLand Diaries," a probing exposé of the ritual pilgrimage to visit Mr. Claus at Macy's, based on his observations as an elf-for-hire. It was at once hilarious and profoundly depressing. There was also a spot-on spoof of those annual family bulletins distributed by mothers-in-law the land over, its excitable punctuation sugarcoating the bad news - in this case, that a baby has mysteriously expired in a washing machine ("he died long before the spin cycle"); and a caustic and unsparing review of an elementary school Nativity play ("6-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin"). Children do not as a rule fare well in the Sedaris oeuvre; perhaps that's why breeders embrace the author so enthusiastically: he allows them to air their darkest, most abominable hostilities in the anodyne fluorescent light of the Barnes & Noble aisle. Rounding out this satisfying sampler was "Christmas Means Giving," the story of a competitive suburban couple who donate their vital organs in an effort to one-up their neighbor's charitable giving (their kids meet a grim end in a "motorized travel sauna"); a less than mesmerizing mock-sermon from an executive television producer; and a slice of life from the author's own eccentric family called "Dinah, the Christmas Whore." That essay culminated with the titular prostitute standing in their kitchen, interrogated by the starry-eyed Sedaris siblings as if she were St. Nick himself. Like "A Charlie Brown Christmas" before it, though with a good deal more swear words, "Holidays on Ice" was a dry indictment of our nation's seasonal kitsch and thoughtless consumption: the shiny crosshatched hams, the corny artificial snow, the ultrasuede basketballs under the tree. Open the closets of ordinary-looking citizens, Sedaris seemed to be saying, and any number of curios - material and emotional - will tumble out. Now the author has decided to take this bitters-soaked little fruitcake of a book, tack on a few extra stories from his more recent publications, garnish it with one that is entirely fresh and wrap the whole thing in a shiny new jacket. Well, pardon me for feeling as if I've been regifted! IT'S not that there isn't much to enjoy in this fortified parade of sad sacks; though there's a certain irony in a New and Improved makeover for a book sending up American shopping habits. The classic stories are still relevant and funny - even under the looming shadow of the credit crisis. The new contribution, an "Animal Farm"-esque fable about a cruel cow and a doomed turkey locked in a game of Secret Santa, is amusing enough. But the other added material - the stuffing, if you will - undermines rather than improves the book. Not all holidays pack the satiric punch of Christmas, it turns out. Reading "Us and Them" and "The Monster Mash," both about Halloween, feels a bit like eating marked-down candy. "Jesus Shaves," borrowed (in slightly different form) from "Me Talk Pretty One Day," is a lame yarn about how the Easter Bunny translates into French. When Sedaris strays from our shores, playing detached cultural reporter rather than fully committed participant, he is arguably less effective, as in "Six to Eight Black Men," a phoned-in bit about Christmas customs in Europe recycled from the collection "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim." Sedaris has long mined the big December festivities for comic gold; these days, it appears, he and his admirers are content to smother it with tinsel. 'SantaLand Diaries,' about the pilgrimage to Macy's, is depressing as well as hilarious. Alexandra Jacobs is an editor at The New York Observer.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Here are six Christmas tales sure to please readers new to humorist, playwright and NPR commentator Sedarisand likely to disappoint his devotees. The three best pieces are reprints from his earlier collections, Barrel Fever and Naked. In "Dinah, the Christmas Whore," young David's 18-year-old sister befriends a prostitute and brings her home one night during Christmas vacation. In "Season's Greetings," a housewife facing homicide charges keeps her loved ones up-to-date on the case in a detailed Christmas missive. In the hilarious "SantaLand Diaries," Sedaris relives his short career as a Macy's department-store elf. In this memoir, the flagship of the collection, we see Sedaris at his wide-eyed best as he takes the SantaLand name of Crumpet, falls for an elf-Casanova named Snowball (as do "three Santas and five other elves") and discovers the seamy underside of the Christmas industry. Compared to the fully realized "Diaries," his three new sketches look very thin indeed: a splenetic theater critic pans the season's local school pageants; a TV producer tries to convince an Appalachian congregation to let him buy the weird life story of one of its members; two grasping, well-to-do families sacrifice everything, including non-vital organs, to out-give each other at Christmas. Sedaris never makes these one-liners pay off. Still, flashes of his customary brilliance, particularly as the critic ("In the role of Mary, six-year-old Shannon Burke just barely manages to pass herself off as a virgin"), will keep this too-slim gift book from disappointing neophytes who find it in their stockings. (Dec.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Since the first edition has sold over 800,000 copies in ten years, it's probably smart to update it with six new stories. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
