Barrel Fever by David Sedaris

I remember falling in love with David Sedaris. I was staying in a Youth Hostel in the Lake District, having gone there to give a talk on ‘the fantastic fringes of the Bloomsbury Group’ to a room of people who couldn’t hear much of what I was saying. My bedroom was under the stairs, so I could hear people walk up and down throughout the night. But it was nice to get away, and of course it meant plenty of uninterrupted reading time.

One of the books I’d brought with me was Sedaris’s book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, which I’d picked out of my book group’s lucky dip Secret Santa. I didn’t know anything about the book or the author. Indeed, I thought it was a novel, and for some reason had decided the narrator was a young girl. It got confusing when the cast of characters changed in the second chapter, and when the narrator was addressed as ‘David’.

I pieced it together, of course, and now know that Sedaris is one of the most beloved humorists of his generation – sharing tales from his eccentric family’s eccentric life, sparing no details and no blushes. His parents, siblings, and long-term boyfriend come in for the most exposure, but anybody who crosses his path is likely to be dealt with in excruiating, gloriously witty prose.

And Barrel Fever (1994) was Sedaris’s first book. It is the only one of his books which divides into ‘Stories’ and ‘Essays’. The former are clearly fictional – for instance, the male narrator of ‘Parade’ has an energetic sexual relationship with Mike Tyson, having dumped Charlton Heston- but there is an interesting note in the beginning saying ‘This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.’ Is this the handiwork of a lawyer? Or do all his books have this disclaimer? Sedaris’s style relies on exaggeration and selection, but I would have assumed that his essays are based in at least some truth.

In my copy, there are only four essays – compared to 12 stories. I started by listening to the audiobook, which confusingly has fewer stories, retitles an essay, adds in one from Me Talk Pretty One Day, and cuts the most famous – ‘SantaLand Diaries’. It also had the cover art for Naked, so maybe I should have been forewarned. Anyway, once I’d compiled the audiobook and the print book, I read everything in Barrel Fever and more – and it is already clear in his first book that Sedaris is much better at the comic personal essay than he is at the short story.

‘Diary of a Smoker’ is a funny, short essay about how Sedaris’s family’s history of smoking, and how annoying it is when well-meaning non-smokers try to get you to quit:

The trouble with aggressive nonsmokers is that they feel they are doing you a favor by not allowing you to smoke. They seem to think that one day you’ll look back and thank them for those precious fifteen seconds they just added to your life. What they don’t understand is that those are just fifteen more seconds you can spend hating their guts and plotting revenge.

‘The SantaLand Diaries’ made Sedaris famous, and is about his exploits and annoyances as an elf for Macy’s department store during the Christmas rush. It is every bit as scathing, self-loathing, and ridiculous as you’d expect from Sedaris writing that scenario – hovering just on the right side of good taste, as there an awful lot of innocent young children who are vulnerable to his sharp tongue.

But my favourite is ‘Giantess’, because it is so sublimely Sedaris. It’s very short, following Sedaris as he works as a painter ande decorator, while simultaneously in talks with the editor of Giantess magazine about submitting erotic fiction about abnormally tall or supernaturally growing women.

The editor of Giantess called to say he’d received my letter and thinks I might have potential. He introduced himsefl as Hank, saying, “I liked your story, Dave, but for Giantess you’ll need to drop the silly business and get straight to the turn-on, if you know what I mean. Do you understand what I’m talking about here, Dave?” Hank told me his readers are interested in women ranging anywhere from ten to seventy-five feet tall, and take their greatest delight in the physical description of a giantess outgrowing her clothing. “Do you know what I’m talking about, Dave? I need to hear those clothes splitting apart. Do you think you can do that for me?”

It’s not exactly the sort of thing I usually read about, but I loved the specificity which Sedaris gives to the absurd. It’s the unasked-for use of ‘Dave’. It’s the exactitude of the height range, and the mundanity of submitting stories to a publication that doesn’t get any less mundane because of the variety of publication. Sedaris looks at the ridiculous face-on and finds a world-weariness in it.

I also enjoyed reading the stories, I should add. My favourite was the satirical ‘Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter’, perhaps because it is the nearest to Sedaris’s voice – albeit through a depth of distortion. For the most part, though, the stories seem an exercise in creating the most unpleasant people possible. Some are cruel, some are so thoughtless that they ruin other people’s lives, and some are evil to the point of absurdity. Individually, they were diverting – but it grows old quite quickly to simply have dreadful characters doing dreadful things. It’s a trick that obscures the more subtle ways that Sedaris can create character and twist scenarios into something special.

There’s no wonder that Sedaris pursued the personal essay for all his subsequent collections. Who knows how much is fiction and how much is genuine autobiography, but the blend is clearly where Sedaris excels. Barrel Fever is most interesting as an author trying his hand at different styles, and he made the right conclusion for his future books.