Frank and Scott went to an Indian restaurant the other night and took a picture of the menu, which offered what it called “a carnival of snackery.”
Carnival of Snackery is about as random and shallow as that opening quote suggests: Covering the years 2003-2020, David Sedaris returns with the second volume of his personal diaries, but unlike Theft by Finding (which I thought was fascinating and illuminating; I’ve read a lot by Sedaris and seeing the source material felt like a gift), this followup feels a bit forced. Put a different way, and using an expression I don’t really like, the first volume — written when Sedaris was struggling and figuring himself out — felt like “punching up”, whereas this half — featuring an aging Sedaris who is oddly preoccupied by getting “edgy” about marginalised communities — feels like “punching down”; but maybe even lazier than that, maybe “pointing down”. Sedaris still has the rare gifts of close observation and turning what he sees into clever and biting commentary, but it gets a little rote here; he has perfected his style, and even in his so-called personal diary, he’s writing for an audience. There were laughs, but also some cringing, maybe even some sighs of irritation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“What did people do before they took pictures of everything?” I whispered to Dawn as we accidentally invaded one photo after another. It was just as bad later on at what amounted to the Village of Yesteryear, a re-creation of a Bedouin encampment. There were a lot of Russians there, all raising their cell phones. The camera has replaced actual looking and turned life into evidence. It drives me crazy.
David Sedaris has written before that he deliberately puts himself out into the world every day, looking for experiences and conversations to write down in his notebook; he might not be looking at the world through his cellphone, but I don’t get the sense that he lets himself just freely experience life (without, you know, turning it “into evidence”.) This book has Sedaris travelling between his homes in England, France, and the U.S.A., circling the globe on an endless book tour, and if he isn’t soliciting a hired driver’s life story, he’s asking audience members at his book signings to tell him a joke. And he gets plenty of great material that way. He also runs across a surprising number of mice, monkeys, and slugs, and when he’s not writing about some morbid fascination he has with people who are missing limbs, he’s writing about a morbid fascination he seems to have with people in wheelchairs:
After wandering through bookstores yesterday, I went to the British Museum for a piece of cake. Beside me sat an English family with three children, the youngest of whom was in a wheelchair. The boy looked happy enough, but surely it was momentary. A pleasant half hour in the café and then it was back to a lifetime of being patronized and stared at. I was just admiring his bravery when his mother rolled him away from the table, and I saw that his leg was in a cast. Then I noted that the chair was a rental and put it together that he wasn’t crippled, just laid up for a few weeks. This sort of thing has happened before, and it always leaves me feeling betrayed — as if the child had intentionally aroused my pity.
I dunno — I guess that has the classic set-up, misdirection, punchline of a standard joke. How about this one:
At Marks and Spencer I emptied my basket onto the belt, saying, “I don’t need a bag, thank you.” Then I watched as my cashier, who wore a badge reading HEARING IMPAIRED, put my items into a bag and charged me ten p. for it. When we tell the disabled they can do anything they want in this world, don’t we mean that they can invent a new kind of alarm system or write a book about loneliness — something, well, that can be accomplished at home?
Is that edgy, or cruel? What about:
I saw in the Tribune that starting September 1, all Marriott hotels will go completely nonsmoking, meaning that I will never again stay at a Marriott. Also in the news is the continued bombing of Lebanon. Fifty children were killed on Saturday and because there’s no wood for coffins, wild dogs are eating their bodies.
I read that and thought, Really, all Marriotts will be nonsmoking?
Yeah, I don’t get a lot of yuks out of dead children jokes.
“A man loses his soul when he has two houses or two women.” This is an old Italian proverb and though I’d love to reject it, I suspect that truer words were never spoken. It was Stefania who quoted it to me, and after it had sunk in, I asked if a man might regain his soul by having three houses.
“I don’t think it works that way,” she said.
“Four?”
I don’t really know how many homes Sedaris owns (because this is a diary and not a comprehensive narrative, he can note that he’s buying a new house without mentioning selling a different one, but he does stop referencing his French country home after buying the English country home; that leaves the Paris and London apartments, the North Carolina oceanside property, the apartment in the Village, and the Upper East Side duplex), so what does that do to a man’s soul; to an artist’s soul? (At a minimum, I think he’s won Monopoly.) Sedaris reports telling people he’s rich (while always refusing the change people ask him for on the street), and he apparently told his father that he doesn’t need to worry about the Sedaris family name dying out so long as he has nine million books in print, and I guess you have to be really well off to wear expensively shredded clothes from Comme des Garçons, or joke that the worst thing about the pandemic was losing Executive Platinum status on American Airlines. Honestly, I think he was funnier when he was hungrier.
I didn’t just turn older this year — I turned old. There wasn’t a specific single moment when I slipped over from middle age; rather, it was gradual, the change not so much physical as mental. There are so many things I don’t understand now. Our constant need to rebrand, for instance. Someone politely referred to me as “queer” not long ago, and I was like, Oh no, you don’t. I was queer in the 1970s, and that was enough for me.
Now in his sixties, at least Sedaris is aware that he’s too establishment to really pass himself off as subversive; even the cussing and sex jokes aren’t really shocking to a modern reader (and the mocking of less powerful groups [including children] just seems in bad taste.) I understand that these are diary fragments; I also understand that Sedaris writes these entries with a future audience in mind and was able to select which bits to use for this volume, and I guess I just wanted something rawer and truer.
