'A pleasure' – Review: Theft by Finding: Diaries, by David Sedaris

Little, Brown, £20

Review by Rosemary Goring

ONE of America’s most observant comic performers, whose collections of laugh-aloud essays include Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris started his literary career with a diary. This, the first volume selected from the eight million or so words he has written across 40 years, has been judiciously pruned. Scythed is probably a better word. First to go, he tells us, was much of 1977-1983. “It’s like listening to a crazy person. The gist is all you need, really.”

Taking us to 2002, this is a substantial book, but Sedaris invites the reader to dip and skim rather than slavishly read every word. This reviewer would suggest you ignore him, and read it A-Z. Like all good diarists, Sedaris writes as he thinks, and the result is entertaining, but also – despite his self-avowed superficiality – rather profound. An inveterate eavesdropper, he takes the pulse of unloved, underclass America as if it were in ER.

As he writes in the introduction, the novice diary keeper writes entries that, “if discovered by your mother or college roommate, would leave them thinking, If only I was civic-minded/bighearted/philosophical...” After a year, however, “you realize it takes time to rail against injustice, time you might better spend questioning fondue or describing those ferrets you couldn’t afford.”

What follows is a helter skelter, yet not haphazard collection that works as a social and economic history in the most intimate sense, showing friends, parties, siblings, parents and one-night encounters, as well as a running tally of his woeful finances. The result is a Gissing-like portrait of garret existence. Politics feature fleetingly, but only insofar as they impact on Sedaris’s life. George Bush senior’s foreign policy does not colour these pages, but persistent anti-gay prejudice does, and one loses count of how often he is called a faggot (“It seems to be written all over my face lately.”). In the early1980s, the rising tide of fear about AIDS is captured, as is the diehard misogyny and racism of the men he works alongside.

The early years show a young man struggling to find his footing. He scrapes a living in dead-end jobs, so clueless at manual labour that he earns the contempt of his fellow building-site workers, such as Luther, who can push a full wheelbarrow up a ramp without breaking sweat. “July 14, 1981: His only question – and he asked it all day – was, ‘What’s he doing here?’ Meaning me.”

Unlike Kenneth Williams or Stephen Fry, Sedaris finds more interest in other people than in himself. In this, he justifies comparisons with Alan Bennett. In other respects, however, they could scarcely be more different. Bennett has an easy formal style, the literary equivalent of a Church’s brogue. Sedaris, meanwhile, is in flip-flops, impish in his mischievous imagination, and with little of Bennett’s intellectual hinterland or laconic sardonicism.

Although he takes 45 minutes a day to write each entry, Sedaris’s diary does not have – nor should it – the polish of his other published prose. That is part of its charm, though as an admirer of his essays, it left me sometimes dissatisfied. But a diary is fluid, fleeting, a series of snapshots, whose meaning and pattern can only be discerned long after events. The diarist can select and frame or airbrush what has happened that day, but in other respects the material is not wilfully chosen.

That, really, is what makes the best diaries compulsive: they sing with personality, rather than dazzle with artistry; are unavoidably artificial, but only up to a point. Thus, we watch as Sedaris moves from his home town in North Carolina to Chicago, and later New York, in both of which cities he grows comfortable in his own skin. After years of penury, he finds success with hit plays on Broadway with his actor sister Amy, and meets his long-term (and one suspects long-suffering) partner Hugh.

Aside from his cruelty to flies, which he feeds to spiders like grapes to a convalescent, it would be hard not to find Sedaris endearing company. The entries teem with friends and family. He is also full of self-mockery, but not to a degree that he becomes a bore. Humour runs through it, as you would expect, but when he goes to French classes in Paris in 1998, he hits a rich seam of comedy, these entries like notes for subsequent, longer pieces.

It was while he was in Paris that the planes flew into the twin towers. Suddenly, the political cannot be avoided. “September 24, 2001: Yesterday morning the phone rang and I heard Hugh say, ‘Oh my God. You’re kidding. When?’ I was sitting at my desk, imagining the worst, when he covered the receiver and said that Leslie had chipped a tooth.”

“October 10, 2001: The news gets more distressing every day. I’m lucky, then, to have Hugh, who’s taken the calm and logical approach. Last night before going to bed he said, ‘What are you so worried about? The guy’s finished. He can’t even come out of his cave.’ I thought of how strange that might have sounded a year ago. ‘He can’t even come out of his cave.’ Who would I have thought he was talking about? What kind of person lives in a cave?”

When it’s well-done, few things match a diary such as this for the sense of companionship and hard-earned wisdom and chutzpah it offers. Like all but the best, this compilation has longueurs and mishits, but these are vastly outweighed by its wit and honesty, Sedaris like a young brother whose spirits never flag. Theft by Finding, in short, is a pleasure. Not that Sedaris could ever write such a banal sentence. On his French course, an assignment involved accepting social invitations. “When asked if she wants to join Henri for a run around the lake, Natalie could reply, ‘With pleasure!’ Instead I’m having her say, ‘That would be different. I’ll just go put on my leg and we’ll be ready to go!”