Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
by David Sedaris
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Book Summary Information
Author: David SedarisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-05-31
ISBN: 0316010790
Number of pages: 257
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780316010795
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
Book Review: Laughing it Off
Summary: 3 Stars
Laughing at oneself is laudable, while laughing in general has been proven to increase overall health. After pulling funny-man David Sedaris' collection of 22 autobiographical short stories, "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim," off my bookshelf after a two-year stay, I expected to laugh heartily. I hadn't considered the life events he would make funny would often be more disturbing and awkward versions of the self-deprecation that I'd been laughing off for years. As critic Shandy Casteel writes, "His stories, while always plausibly crafted, accentuate the absurdities that seem to transpire around him with every breath and every step" ("Dressing Before the Funhouse Mirror").
As if he's sitting across from you at a dinner party, Sedaris' stories are told with natural simplicity and clarity. Each story, joke and punch line flows with an odd spontaneity, as if he hadn't given it much thought until writing it at that moment. With witty and punching prose, Sedaris is a master at his craft. He doesn't knock the reader out with fancy punctuation or big words when a diminutive one would do. He doesn't over assert his intelligence or writing ability. He writes clearly about the mundanity of life: hoarding Halloween candy as a child, house shopping, and being a house cleaner and having the man strip down before you. Yeah, OK, that last one has never happened to me, either, but he excels at knowing exactly how much to say on a topic and where to end for the optimal punch. It's universal truths he extracts from his quirky family, neighbors and situations, which often left me smiling and thinking, Why didn't I think of that?
Spanning from his childhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, to present day in France with partner Hugh, the stories are placed in chronological order. One of the collection's first stories, "Us and Them," is a brilliant view of family dynamics and childhood Halloween-candy greed. Pointing out one of the many odd truisms he extracts from his stories, Sedaris writes, "Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand that" (8). In "The Ship Shape," a story in which the Sedaris' consider purchasing a second home, young David and his mother spend the day repeating a woman's comment to a Korean dry cleaner, who "nodded, the way you do when you're a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence" (17). Sedaris masterfully extracts the nuggets of truth in life, but sometimes he crosses the imaginary line.
While the collection has received widespread acclaim for its humor, I crossed the threshold of page 200 before I really threw my head back in laughter. During most of the book, I found myself twisting my face, or at most, giving a gentle giggle at his always surprising wit. Many of Sedaris' stories are well intentioned, but often disturbing in their content. In "Full House," young Sedaris, a budding adolescent and homosexual, is invited to an all-male sleepover. While winning Strip Poker, he makes a fully naked boy sit on his lap as further punishment: "'Hey,' I told him, `I'm the one who's going to be suffering. I was just looking for something easy'" (40). In an equally awkward, yet more serious story, "The Girl Next Door," Sedaris unwittingly becomes an unpaid babysitter for his neighbors' daughter until she begins to steal from him. The young girl retaliates to his tattle telling by writing slanderous comments on his stuff and calling him a "Faggot" when he walks by. Sedaris' mother urges him to move out, fearing false molestation charges. Remaining likeable as a writer and character, Sedaris sometimes wiggles into areas too serious to be funny, which causes the reader to squirm.
"Blood Work," the collections' most awkward disturbing story, recounts Sedaris' days of working as a house cleaner. When called by a man who unwittingly switched Sedaris' number for an erotic housecleaning service, the man undresses before him and performs tasteless acts, while Sedaris cleans the house. While his attempt to turn the awkward into amusing is laudable, it never came to fruition in my taste.
The book's highlight characters are his family: his sister Amy, who asks if the passenger dog is OK when a car crashes, and his foul-mouth brother Paul, whose language is so explicit and shocking it's hilarious. I have an aversion to comedians who use cursing as a cheap cop-out for laughs, but Paul isn't a comedian. (Quoting him wouldn't be very family friendly, so I'll refrain.) On using his family as the memorable characters in his books, Sedaris writes, "In my mind, I'm like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family's started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up." And how does his family feel about his use of their life, privacy and sorrow: "They're sick of it." It's reasonable of them, but they're just too quirky too not to share.
While I wasn't doubled over laughing throughout the book, I may have expected too much. On a second reflection of "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim," I like smirking, or even just wincing, at other people's awkward moments. Maybe I'll read one of Sedaris' other books--for my health, of course.
Summary of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
David Sedaris plays in the snow with his sisters. He goes on vacation with his family. He gets a job selling drinks. He attends his brother's wedding. He mops his sister's floor. He gives directions to a lost traveler. He eats a hamburger. He has his blood sugar tested. It all sounds so normal, doesn't it? In his newest collection of essays, David Sedaris lifts the corner of ordinary life, revealing the absurdity teeming below its surface. His world is alive with obscure desires and hidden motives -- a world where forgiveness is automatic and an argument can be the highest form of love. Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim is another unforgettable collection from one of the wittiest and most original writers at work today.It just isn?t fair: most of us would be lucky to be able to express ourselves in writing half as well as David Sedaris does in his new book, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. But on top of his skills with the written word, the author also has substantial gifts as a performer, and he proves this on the audio version of the book. In his essay The Change in Me,Sedaris remembers that his mother was good at imitating people, and it?s clear that he takes after her. Whether he?s doing impressions of high-voiced brother Paul, or recalling times when he and his sisters tried to win good karma by speaking and acting like well-behaved, fairytale children, Sedaris?s nuanced performance hits the right note on both the opening, comedic stories, and the more poignant essays that tend to come later in the reading. In fact, for those who have already read some of the best stories in other publications including The New Yorker, the CD or cassette version of this collection is probably the best bet for furthering your appreciation of the material.
Sedaris?s career is closely linked with two things: audio (he was discovered by NPR?s Ira Glass), and the personal lives of himself and his family. In Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, he describes fights with his boyfriend, and his sister-in-law?s difficult pregnancy. When sister Lisa complains about the stories involving the family, he writes about that, too. Sedaris's latest provides more evidence that he is a great humorist, memoirist and raconteur, and readers are lucky to have the opportunity to know him so well. Perhaps they are luckier still not to know him personally. --Leah Weathersby
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