Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Conclusion)

Our next stop on the tour of David Sedaris’s family is his youngest sister, Tiffany.  His other two sisters, besides Lisa, are Gretchen and Amy, but we don’t get a chapter on them in this book.  Maybe he is sparing them from his acerbic wit out of respect, or pity.  Or maybe he rakes them over the coals in a different book.  If so, I may get to read about them after all, as I intend to read more by this author!  Tiffany is the problem child of the family, having been in juvenile detention and living a rather nomadic life ever since.  She makes it clear that she doesn’t even like her family, and that she has been dreading his visit.  It’s hard for me to imagine having a sibling that detests you; it makes me wonder why David even tries to connect with her. 

At this point in the narrative, Sedaris seems to run out of the obvious topics on which to base the chapters, and brings up rather random-seeming events, little snapshots of his life which are all the more bizarre for their mundaneness.  A meal spent with Hugh and a female friend of his, during which she informs him that you are supposed to eat a piece of pie from the outer crust inward, saving the tip until last, and making a wish on it.  A trip to a different state in which everything goes sour, and an awkward situation in which he is sure he looks like a child molester.  All of these are told in his remarkably comic, eloquent and poignant “voice,” while underscoring what it is like to live in his world. 

Listening to a talk-radio show, he hears about a pedophilia case:  “The Catholic Church scandal had been front-page news for over a week, and when the priest angle had been exhausted, the discussion filtered down to pedophilia in general and then, homosexual pedophilia, which was commonly agreed to be the worst kind.  It was, for talk radio, one of those easy topics, like tax hikes or mass murder.  ‘What do you think of full-grown men practicing sodomy on children?’  ‘Well, I’m against it!’  This was always said as if it was somehow startling, a minority position no one had yet dared lay claim to…Then, little by little, they’d begin interchanging the words homosexual and pedophile, speaking as if they were one and the same.  ‘These homosexuals can’t reproduce themselves, and so they go into the schools and try to recruit our young people.’  It was nothing I hadn’t heard before, but I was crankier than usual and found myself in the middle of the room, one sock on and one sock off, shouting at the clock radio.  ‘Nobody recruited me, Audrey.  And I begged for it.’” 

This book isn’t really about homosexuality – and yet it is permeated with the sense of what it’s like to be gay in this society, in much the same way that a book written by a black man or woman will be permeated by a sense of what it’s like to be black in the same society.  This perspective is important to the author, and so it becomes an important theme of the book. 

 

Sedaris’s brother, Paul, is the first one in the family to give his parents a grandchild, much to everyone’s surprise.  The description of the ever-so-crude Paul’s reaction to fatherhood is as appalling as it is funny.  He is totally engrossed in the experience in his Beverly Hillbilly way, complete with endless photographs and videos; some of them rather disgusting.  Or is David exaggerating?  At one point, in one of Paul’s videos, he holds the baby up to the camera “and she gave a little, two-syllable cry that sounded to Paul like ‘whoopee!’ but [David] interpreted as something closer to ‘help meeeee.’”  We can’t choose our relatives; even our parents.  And that, of course, is the over-riding theme of this wonderful book!





September’s book of the month: "Red Mist," by Patricia Cornwell.  With high-tension suspense and cutting-edge technology, Patricia Cornwell--the world's #1 bestselling crime writer--once again proves her exceptional ability to entertain and enthrall in this remarkable novel featuring chief medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

[With Labor Day coming up, school getting underway and all the chaos that entails, we'll skip a weekend and shoot for September 7th as our first target date for comments.  See you then!]

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Chapters 12-16)

Half way through the book and we’ve moved into his early adult life.  We get a closer look at Hugh, apparently David’s soul mate (husband?).  As effeminate as David intends to depict himself, Hugh appears to be the emotional one, as we examine their respective reactions to a romantic move (chick flick?).  “I asked if he always cried during comedies, and he accused me of being grossly insensitive, a charge I’m trying to plea-bargain down to simply obnoxious…  Looking back, I should have known better than to accompany Hugh to a love story.” 

Our author is introducing his family to us one by one, camouflaging the fact with chapter titles that throw us off the scent.  After his father and his mother, next up is Lisa, his older sister.  He has already admitted to being somewhat OCD, but his descriptions of some of Lisa’s foibles paint her as being even worse.  She is particularly nervous about how she will be depicted in a movie that is to be made of some of David’s writing, having been appalled at some of his revelations of her and other family members in his books.  I have to admit, I would be nervous, too!  The passages regarding his sister’s pet parrot, Henry, are particularly fun.  Who kisses their pet parrot?  “She stuck out her tongue, and he accepted the tip gingerly between his upper and lower beak.  I’d never dream of doing such a thing, not because it’s across-the-board disgusting but because he would have bitten the s__t out of me.” 

Sandwiched in between Lisa and Paul, David’s younger brother, is an exposition on the cultural differences regarding the Santa Claus myth.  He finds that the Dutch version of the story doesn’t include elves (“…Oscar denounced the very idea as grotesque and unrealistic”) but “…six to eight black men.  I asked several Dutch people to narrow it down, but none of them could give me an exact number.  It was always ‘six to eight,’ which seems strange, seeing as they’ve had hundreds of years to get an accurate head count.”  As mentioned in the last post, the phrasing and word choice of such quips are a large part of the humor here.  It makes you wonder if his speech is peppered with the same verbal gems – as I suspect that it is. 

We really have to wonder if David’s brother Paul is really as redneck crude as these anecdotes claim.  If a boy grows up knowing that his older brother is gay, does he make a special attempt to be a crass, loudmouth opposite of his sibling?  We have already seen that the father has some rather rough edges along these lines, but Paul’s testosterone level reminds us of some of the cruder scenes in the movie “Deliverance.”  When Paul left home to go out on his own, it “was like releasing a domestic animal into the wild.  He knew how to plan a meal but displayed a remarkable lack of patience when it came time for the actual cooking.  Frozen dinners were often eaten exactly as sold, the Salisbury steak amounting to a stickless meat Popsicle.”

 

And more about Hugh.  Here one might be reminded of Oscar and Felix, of “The Odd Couple” while apartment hunting, with Hugh being excited and “seeing the possibilities” of each apartment while David is gagging on the smell of stagnant urine.  The real estate agent they worked with “sensed my lack of enthusiasm and wrote it off as a failure of imagination.  ‘Some people can see only what is in front of them,’ she sighed.”  She later referred to his misgivings over their selection as buyer’s remorse.  “’But don’t worry, it’s perfectly natural.’  Natural.  A strange word when used by an eighty-year-old with an unlined face and hair the color of an American school bus.”





Next week: Conclusion.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Chapters 7-11)

First, I have to amend my statement in the last post about this book not being laugh-out-loud funny.  I admit it: I laughed out loud several times during this segment of the book.  This requires a different skill set on the part of a humorist writer than the stand-up comic.  If it’s largely about delivery – as opposed to content alone – the stand-up comic delivers with voice inflection and with timing, the perfectly placed pause or pace of delivery.  The humorist writer has to rely on phrasing a lot more, along with word choice and sentence arrangement.  I’m not an expert on this, but Mr. Sedaris appears to have quite mastered these elements, in my view. 

There is some nice history in these anecdotes, also.  For those of us who lived through the sixties (and, yes, remember them!) there is a strong feeling of re-visiting the past in these pages.  The description of the “hippies” and how they act, dress and speak might be lost on someone who wasn’t around back then.  To today’s college age reader, “hippy” means something rather different than it did then, and the attitude that “normal” people had toward “hippies” at that time – nicely depicted by Sedaris’s mother and her reactions – probably can’t be fully appreciated.  His attempts to dress like a hippy being ridiculed by the “real hippies” speaks to a cultural disconnect prevalent at the time which is difficult to convey to modern youth; especially the ones who attempt to emulate them.

His relationship with his mother is explored in depth in these pages, and we get a pretty clear picture of a rather complex woman, with strengths and weaknesses we can really relate to.  She is not above mocking her son:  “Being mocked by the untalented was easy to brush off, but my mother was really good at imitating people.  Coming from her, I sounded spoiled and vacant, like a Persian cat, only human.”  And a quote from her: “You don’t think I know how these things work?  I wasn’t just born some middle-aged woman with a nice purse and a decent pair of shoes.  My God, the things you don’t know.  My God.” 

Some very poignant moments are depicted as well.  After his father kicks him out of the house, he doesn’t realize that the real reason is because he is gay.  “My mother assumed that I knew the truth, and it tore her apart.  Here was yet another defining moment, and again I missed it entirely.  She cried until it sounded as if she were choking.  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.  ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’”  So not only does the humor intensify in this section, but the human drama does as well.  And so do the references to his being gay.

 

Up to the eleventh chapter, the book is probably “PG-13”.  In a decided wrenching into a new direction, we suddenly enter deeply into the realm of “R”.  Just about the time I’m thinking my wife will enjoy this book when I’m through with it, we get an extended scene that is borderline pornographic in nature – but it’s such bizarre Situation Comedy that there is no doubt that it has its place in this semi-autobiographic work.  Who knew that there was such a thing as an erotic housecleaning service?  “…you’d think that on seeing me, he might have realized his mistake.  I’ve never dealt with an erotic housecleaning service, but something tells me the employees are hired for their looks rather than their vacuuming skills.  Something tells me they only surface clean.  I’d wonder for weeks why Martin had put up with me.  In his growing impatience it seemed he would have simply told me what he wanted…”  Yikes – time to move on!





Next week's chapters: 12-16.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (Chapters 1-6)

The tone of Sedaris’s humor-writing is just right.  It doesn’t have the over-the-top silliness of Dave Berry, the subtlety of Mark Twain, the philosophical underpinning of George Carlin, or the snide smirkiness of Ann Coulter, but it does have a nice comic twist that permeates a smooth story-telling flow.  I’m reminded most of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, of which I count myself a loyal fan.  The first page or two warms up slowly, with just the mildest fun poked at his mom when he was a young boy.  But by the fourth page or so, I was smiling broadly, and not long after that I was stifling chuckles.  Again, not “laugh-out-loud funny” but very clever and entertaining – just what I was in the mood for. 

His account of the social significance of television-watching really hits a chord with me.  My family when I was growing up wasn’t as addicted to the TV as most were, but it was on for a least a little while almost every day.  In my house today we sometimes go for weeks without having the TV on and then only to play DVDs or videos.  Sedaris points up the fact that we run the risk of being socially marginalized – to the point of backwardness – if we don’t keep up with the latest shows.  As a child, he felt pity for the children of the neighborhood family that “didn’t believe in” TV, almost as if it was a form of child abuse.  But the social commentary never trumps the humor here – it never gets preachy, and you sense that it never comes close. 

I had known before reading Sedaris that he is very upfront among gay authors regarding his gayness, and I expected to read at least minor references to it here.  The chapter where he is coerced into playing strip poker with a group of boys at a sleepover is brilliant:  “To the rest of the group, a naked boy was like a lamp or a bath mat, something so familiar and uninteresting that it faded into the background, but for me it was different.  A naked boy was what I desired more than anything on earth, and when you were both watching and desiring, things came up, one thing in particular that was bound to stand out and ruin your life forever.”  If you’re not squeamish about such things, this is hilarious.  I have only had a handful (excuse me!) of gay friends over the years, but I have always found them to be very good company, especially if they are comfortable enough with you to talk about such things openly. 

Sedaris has a lot of really meaningful things to say about school-age social structures, popularity, cliques, and what it’s like to be on the outside.  He’s not trying to enlighten us; the humor is still at the forefront.  But his powers of observation are keen, as the best humorists’ are, and his analysis leads me to realize just how oblivious to that whole scene I was at that age.  I hadn’t realized how unusual that made me, then, and I still pretty much ignore the social subtleties that I have no control over.  The young Sedaris was painfully aware of his “shortcomings.” 

His father is depicted in the brutal light of reality as a callous, blustering blowhard.  I’m gradually becoming more aware that there are a lot of people who viewed their fathers that way growing up.  Again, I feel like the unusual one, unable to relate to this image due to the fact that my own father was one of those kind souls that are loved by everyone, and deservedly so.  The father depicted here is one that embarrasses his children by his behavior and glaring inconsistencies: “In the coming years our father would continue to promise what he couldn’t deliver, and in time, we grew to think of him as an actor auditioning for the role of a benevolent millionaire.”  Ouch.  Parenting is a skill that most parents never develop to any great degree.

 

 

 

 

 

Next week's chapters: 7-11.