Jul 04, 2008  |  By: KATHI WOLFE  | COMMENTS     

Comedy and tragedy are often only narrowly separated, a truism ruefully explored by gay writer and “This American Life” contributor David Sedaris in a new essay collection “When You Are Engulfed in Flames.” Sedaris is back with witty, self-deprecating, tender and sardonic musings on everything from longtime boyfriend Hugh Hamrick to guinea worms and quitting smoking.

Sedaris, 51, is not as side-splittingly funny or as edgy in “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” as he was in his previous collections. He’s no longer the snarky elf of the “SantaLand Diaries,” the NPR commentary that made him famous when he was in his 30s. His preoccupations with his wacky family and dysfunction have become less intense, but this doesn’t mean that Sedaris has lost his touch. “When You Are Engulfed in Flames” is replete with Sedaris’ mordant observations and wit.

Since childhood, Sedaris has been obsessed with death (as a boy he often dug up dead animals that were buried), so now in mid-life he’s acutely aware of his own mortality. One Christmas, Sedaris gave Hamrick, an artist, a 300-year-old human skeleton as a present. It was the perfect gift — exactly what he wanted — except that the skeleton began to talk to Sedaris nonstop. 

“You are going to die,” it said until Sedaris couldn’t take it anymore: “… that’s when I broke down,” Sedaris writes, “I’ll do anything you like,’ I said, ‘…I’ll bathe in rainwater…’ just please say something, anything, else.”  After a moment’s hesitation, Sedaris adds, the skeleton told him, “You are going to be dead … some day.” Sounding like Woody Allen, Sedaris thinks, “Well, that’s a start.”

SEDARIS AND HAMRICK, WHO live in France now, have been together since they met 18 years ago, and their relationship is a constant in Sedaris’ life and work.

“Old Faithful” is one of the most touching and wry pieces in “When You Are Engulfed in Flames.”  It’s a lovely piece, even though Sedaris writes here about how Hamrick lanced a painful boil on his butt for him. After Hamrick finished this yucky task, Sedaris writes that he told him, “I know you’ll do it again if I need you to. We’re an aging monogamous couple, and this is all part of the bargain.” The thought of this kept Hamrick awake that night, Sedaris adds, “and still does. We go to bed and he stares toward the window as I sleep soundly beside him, my bandaged boil silently weeping onto the sheets.”

A few critics, including Alex Heard in a New Republic article, have said that some of the facts in Sedaris’ work aren’t accurate. “I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using a nonfiction label,” Heard wrote.

But given Sedaris’ own statements on his writings veracity, this critique becomes moot. “The events described in these stories are realish,” he writes in an author’s note in “When You Are Engulfed in Flames.” Truth being stranger than fiction, Sedaris probably purchased the skeleton for Hamrock, but the odds are that it didn’t literally talk to him (at least, here’s hoping).

Yet, since Sedaris, who has won the Thurber Prize for American humor, is a humorist, why should this matter? His work becomes super-real, which very often reflects the internal landscape and “reality” of our lives.

“It sometimes helps to remind myself that not everyone is like me,” Sedaris writes when he finds himself sitting in his underwear in a hospital waiting room among fully dressed strangers. “Not everyone writes things down in a notebook and then transcribes them into a diary.  Fewer still will take that diary … and read it in front of an audience.”  

It may not be good if you’re among the airline passengers, rude cab-drivers or whacked-out babysitters that make it into Sedaris’ notebooks, but these scribblings are fertile material for “When You Are Engulfed in Flames,” a solid, though not brilliant, read.