Book review of Naked by David Sedaris

            I undertook reading Naked a decade after its publication and surely after much hype surrounding the book had died down.  I knew, however, that author David Sedaris had already been hailed as an important American voice and that this book was quite popular amongst his many fans.  I started with a bit of apprehension and a fair amount of enthusiasm – knowing that it might be a challenging task to form my own opinion of the book after having heard so many others’.

            Naked partakes in the increasingly popular genre of the ‘memoir-as-novel’ and, says the description on the back of the book, is one in which “Sedaris turns the current mania for the memoir on its proverbial ear, mining the exceedingly rich terrain of his life, his family, and his unique worldview – a sensibility at once take-no-prisoners sharp and deeply charitable.”  This book, as a departure from or mockery of the memoir genre, may be on target (as I’ve read very few of these and can’t really say), but, nonetheless, the text did not generally strike me as anything other than flippant self indulgence.  Making fun of people, as well as making fun of one’s self, can surely elicit a good chuckle and the occasional roar of laughter, but I’m not sure that, at the book’s close, it amounts to much more than a collection of jokes and observations that one might otherwise encounter at a typical house party for the queer, urban elite.  Witty repartee is, no doubt, a necessary survival tool for any gay man, and while it does occasionally illuminate a truth or two, it often does so without any sense of humanity or relevance - it is, essentially, the ability to express that one is astute enough to notice, but smart enough not to care.  This in itself provides for a very entertaining read, as Sedaris introduces us to the clumsy, idiotic, and often racist, homophobic, or otherwise prejudiced characters he has apparently encountered on his journey, but it fails to execute any meaningful task or tell us much about ourselves as humans (or even about Sedaris as an individual), other than that we’re delusional egoists.

            What we get, on the whole, is something neither touching nor sincere, at least not in the way I expect it from works of art (or nearly-art) but instead something that proposes life and its undertaking to be not much more than awkward situations, missed opportunities, and random happenings…all with no meaning and purpose.  Perhaps this IS what life is about and perhaps it’s also what we should be trying to grasp…that existence is some big joke?  What is often more exciting, however, is the oscillation between the meaningful and the meaningless, that, in our struggle to ‘understand it all’, we continuously go back and forth between ‘everything matters’ and ‘nothing matters’, residing most of the time in some sort of middle ground where things exist and pass us by.  Surely, being able to laugh at ourselves and our situations is important, but doing so at the expense of depth and meaningfulness reduces this book to mere entertainment and prevents it from being elevated to any higher level.  Maybe this is Sedaris’ intention; maybe this is all I should have expected.

            Despite my ranting and general disappointment with the text (expecting it to be something more than a joke book), I was able to identify that I too, as a young gay man, shared (with Sedaris) the inability to comprehend why everyone didn’t see my greatness all the time, or how people could be so inconsiderate of my, supremely important, needs.  The difference is, of course, that though Sedaris may have struggled to get a proper audience in his youth, he now bends the ear of countless readers and thus, his holier-than-thou attitude is somehow justified.  Instead of indicating that I (as his trying-to-identify-with-the-author reader) should give it up and recognize my irrelevance, his example encourages me to continue on my path of self-importance until I too wield some significant, greater power in society.  This is not the lesson my already over-inflated ego needs, but it sure makes me feel good about myself.

            I do not disagree that the text is funny, only that it fails to live up to the hype.  I’d recommend this book only to those who have nothing better to read, have procured headaches from reading ‘serious’ texts, or are depressed and need a good laugh.  After reading – pass it on, resell or recycle…but please, don’t let it muck up your library.