Calypso

David Sedaris

Little, Brown, £16.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

“Though I’ve often lost faith in myself, writes David Sedaris, “I’ve never lost faith in my family.” For all their bickering they are a perennial source of comfort, not least because of his certainty that his clan is “fundamentally better than everyone else.” So saying, Sedaris sets up this new collection of essays as an opportunity to place his family centre stage.

The other Sedarises make David look demure. Those familiar with one of America’s finest humorists will already know the bare bones of his family tree. One of six children, his mother died while he was a young man, but his father is robustly alive at 90. However, as the title of the second chapter, “Now We are Five”, reveals, the number of siblings has diminished. Sedaris’s sister Tiffany committed suicide in 2013, leaving them stunned. When they cleared her rundown social services room, they found photos of the family ripped to shreds, and a plethora of mop handles. Everything she owned fitted into two cardboard boxes.

Tiffany’s death acts as the trigger for bringing his relatives into the spotlight, as if to honour them while they are still alive – though in so doing also to mock, in the nicest possible way. And while it is in one of these essays that he reveals his mother was an alcoholic – a word studiously avoided while she was alive – the spirit of Calypso is not one of grief, but of wonder. From a penniless misfit, Sedaris is now so wealthy he only travels Business Platinum class, and owns houses in Britain and the USA. Audiences of 2000 turn up across America to hear him read and perform, and nobody can fault his work ethic. Recently, he did 45 shows in 47 days, one of them while suffering diarrhoea. His assistant was in the wings, he tells us, with a bucket. Cue recollections of a man who disgraced himself in that manner on a plane. If there is a juvenile scataological allusion to be made, Sedaris cannot resist.

The connecting theme to these essays, which otherwise leap around like a grasshopper, is facing up to mortality. In the opener, Company Man, Sedaris revels in having enough space in his olde-worlde English house for guests: “Yes, the washer on my penis has worn out, leaving me to dribble urine long after I’ve zipped my trousers back up. But I have two guest rooms.” So far, he and his partner Hugh have been lucky in not getting seriously ill but he knows the time is coming when that will change. “Then we’ll be picked off like figures at a shooting gallery, easy targets given the lives we’ve led.”

The episode from which the book takes its title is, for this reader, the least engaging, because it is gross. A few years ago Sedaris bought a beach house in Emerald Isle, in his home state of North Carolina, so his family could get together more often. Called the Sea Section, it is close to a bridge beneath which snapping turtles skirmish for scraps tossed by passers-by. One of these creatures, nicknamed Calypso, is deformed by an enormous tumour. When Sedaris has a benign tumour removed from his side – the means by which this is done, late at night by one of his readers in her own home is another story – he puts it in the freezer until he can return to the beach and feed it to Calypso. In the end, he is too late and a healthier specimen falls heir to his generosity. Shortly after, during an epic row, Hugh asks: “What’s it like to know that the best part of yourself just got fed to a snapping turtle?”

Not many of us could answer that, but if anyone can it is this laureate of the everyday, who brings the surreal and whimsical to a new level. That, in fact, is his greatest talent. Turning daily life into the stuff of entertainment requires not just a vivid imagination but considerable stylistic skill. More substantial and satisfying than his recently published diaries, perhaps because written with an audience in mind, Calypso breezes along like a page-turning novel, filled with personalities, drama, and life. There are fewer laugh-out-loud scenarios than in previous collections – none has eclipsed Me Talk Pretty One Day in that regard. But Calypso’s humour should be measured not by the one-liners but by the wry perspective it offers on negotiating everyday matters.

These essays dig deep in the family archive material, but most notable are the vignettes of his father. They get on pretty well now, but tensions from the past occasionally surface, and when the topics of Republicans or Donald Trump surface, their shouting could clear a football stadium. Mr Sedaris’s Christmas presents are the sort of which Steptoe would approve, yet Sedaris accepts them docilely. Doubtless he hears the ticking of a clock to which Sedaris senior seems oblivious. One day,spying his father’s leather slippers, he asks: “If anything should ever... happen to you, do you think that maybe I could have them?” “What would ever happen to me?” his dad replies.

Knitting the family into almost every essay, Sedaris nevertheless allows himself to roam over whatever is preoccupying him that moment, from up-selling barristas to the tyranny of his Fitbit, under whose watch he clocks up 65,000 steps a day. Plain throughout this entertaining, often touching but occasionally laboured collection is his knack of turning the painful or the difficult into comedy. “Is it my fault that the good times fade to nothing while the bad ones burn forever bright? Memory aside, the negative just makes for a better story: the plane was delayed, an infection set in, outlaws arrived and reduced the schoolhouse to ashes. Happiness is harder to put into words.” Garrison Keillor and his admirers might quibble with that, but it’s a theory that has served Sedaris well.