Oddball Travelogue That Is All Detours

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/books/lets-explore-diabetes-with-owls-by-david-sedaris.html

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David Sedaris doesn’t write like a writer. He writes like someone who writes for a living. That’s a different thing, and not necessarily a bad one: Mr. Sedaris can be the life of your two-person party if you turn to his essays for quick, easy diversion and nothing more. But only a man with column space to fill would devote the first eight pages of a book to the experience of having dental work done in France.

“Dentists Without Borders” is the opening selection in “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls,” Mr. Sedaris’s latest collection, replete with previously published work. (Nearly half these riffs have appeared in The New Yorker.) It’s not a particularly auspicious kickoff. Mr. Sedaris enjoyed his French dental visits, but he wouldn’t sell many books on the basis of reader interest in his gum disease. His best-seller-dom has more to do with his entertaining public persona and better, earlier work than with the wit or subject matter on the page.

An explanation of his strategy appears in “Day In, Day Out,” one of this book’s few originals. It describes his decades of diary keeping, and how he compulsively saves odd bits of information, like a British newspaper article titled “Dangerous Olives Could Be on Sale.”

“Even if what I’m recording is of no consequence, I’ve got to put it down on paper,” he explains. What becomes of such snippets? Treat them as essay ingredients. Oddball minutiae are to “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls” what raisins are to raisin bread.

The bulk of this book concerns Mr. Sedaris’s famously antic family, his longtime partner and his health, politics, childhood, hometown (Raleigh, N.C.) and travels. He composes columns skillfully enough to mix several of these subjects in a single entry, like “Memory Laps,” which begins with swimming, then segues into how his Greek grandmother came to live with his family after she was hit by a truck. When Mr. Sedaris, then a child, offered to stay home with her to help her avoid accidents, his mother replied: “The hell you will. A nice steep fall is just what I’m hoping for.”

The same piece then moves on to the Osmond Brothers, because the senior Mr. Sedaris, who had no soft spot for little David, had a Donny Osmond fixation. “Donny’s the thunderbolt,” Mr. Sedaris recalls his father as saying. “Take him out of the picture, and they’re nothing.” Such pivoting changes of topic are at least as athletic as the author’s swimming at the Raleigh Country Club ever was.

When it comes to travel, Mr. Sedaris calls Australia “Canada in a thong,” fixates on the ubiquity and high visibility of excrement in China and reveals some secrets of pent-up flight attendants trying to be nice to obnoxious passengers. He also talks about living overseas during the 2008 presidential election and being constantly grilled about American politics.

“Being a white American, you wouldn’t vote for a black man, would you?” a small-town Normandy reporter asked him. As a writer and celebrity, he seems to have drawn more than his share of press attention. “I could have written a history of frosting,” he says, “and still they’d have asked me about Guantánamo, and my country’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Accords.” By the time the election was over, “Oh, get your own black president” was his unspoken thought.

This book’s longer pieces, like one on the elaborate consequences of Mr. Sedaris’s losing his passport, are its draggiest. His thoughts on picking up roadside rubbish are as dull as the subject suggests. This book also includes the middle-aged writer’s obligatory colonoscopy story (Dave Barry wrote a better one), but Mr. Sedaris does finish his with a flash of malevolent wit. His test results are fine. But he imagines scaring his father by claiming to have cancer, and treats this as a happy thought.

Among Mr. Sedaris’s efforts to change things up are six short stand-up bits supposedly intended for kids delivering monologues in school contests. (The best of them sounds a lot like Paul Rudnick’s irresistible alter ego Libby Gelman-Waxner.) Also in the Rudnick vein is “I Break for Traditional Marriage,” a monologue from a straight man so enraged by New York State’s legalizing gay marriage that he starts killing his next of kin.

“The high jinks in New York made a sham of my marriage, so it logically made the fruits of that marriage meaningless as well,” he says about shooting his lazy daughter. “That was one good thing that came of it.” The other good thing: a male Hispanic illegal immigrant as a cellmate. “I’m here to tell you that, as long as you keep your eyes shut, it’s really not that bad,” the speech concludes.

Why is this book called “Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls”? Not for any good reason. It includes a creepily unfunny piece that links taxidermy with Valentine’s Day, but that doesn’t count for much. All the title is really about is attracting attention. In his workmanlike way, Mr. Sedaris is still pretty good at that.