‘Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls’, by David Sedaris – review

David Sedaris writes principally for The New Yorker. Urbane, then, American, smart. But is he a memoirist, a fabulist or an essayist? He is most often described as a humorist, but he’s not funny like, say, Woody Allen. He’s no Stephen Leacock. The aim of his writing is not to make the reader laugh.

Which is not to say that there isn’t at least a chuckle or two and usually a guffaw in each of the 26 pieces that comprise this book. While studying Life in the UK in order to apply for Indefinite Leave to stay here, Sedaris learns much that the rest of us do not know: ‘I learned that people below the age of 16 cannot deliver milk in the UK, but I don’t think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices.’ This is wonderfully dry and clever and made me snort.

He is a staunch anti-Republican. It is not that he doesn’t share many conservative prejudices (he hates litter, obscene T-shirts, Chinese standards of hygiene, graffiti), but that he doesn’t share the extreme ones, and his assumption is that anyone who votes Republican must have them. This is odd, because one of Sedaris’s appeals is his dispassionate observation of himself and his own foibles.

His popularity (he has sold in millions) is partly explained perhaps by his willingness to write with honesty about his family. Peaceful lives require us to be diplomatic in our familial relations. Sedaris undoes his own can of worms with the sharpest of openers. You can hear the tin screech as the serrations tear through it.

His principal target is his father, whom he seems intent on punishing in print in the way the boy David was punished with spoken word and occasional deed.