PanGawkerSedaris simultaneously asserts himself as the undisputed past master of this tone and captures its fundamental weakness, applying the style he has developed for the last 30 years to a subject matter for which it is almost eerily unsuited ... it has the ring of truth, that funny quality of how things really are. The ability to evoke this quality has always been Sedaris’s great strength, and it shines through in this collection, mostly in the form of non sequiturs attributed to his sisters. They’re the kind of things your friends and family might say, if they were funnier, and in this way they are better than jokes, because they are not laugh traps the author has built to spring upon you so much as little cracks in the orderly surface of the world, across which he reaches for your hand — in a word: relatable ... It is ironic, then, that relatability also turns out to be the absolute bête fucking noire of this collection, cropping up again and again to recast Sedaris not as the antsy everyman we grew up with but rather as some kind of moneyed Aspergers case ... This life of wealth and fame provides a fundamentally different backdrop for the likable fuck-up persona Sedaris developed in Santaland and subsequent essays ... From a writer who meets fans everywhere he goes and has to think for a second to remember how many homes he owns, self-deprecation rings false ... Sedaris can’t seem to do it. Either he doesn’t have enough tools in the box or he just refuses to look too closely at any of these understandably difficult subjects, so instead he writes about them in the same tone he used to write about department-store Santas and being bad at French, with disastrously jarring results ... In the space of about a page, we go from pure Sex and the City banter to a kind of half joke about possible childhood abuse to a zero-humor instance of ongoing dysfunction in their adult relationship, with no cues about how seriously we’re supposed to take any of it ... If Sedaris were more emotionally forthcoming or just willing to linger for a few sentences on a single thought, the answer might be \'very seriously while laughing,\' a mode in which some of the best humor can operate. But his unrelenting emphasis on fast pace and light tone — that is to say, glibness — leaves him with too little time to explore the complicated and clearly ambivalent ways he feels about his father, about death, about social disintegration, and about all the other heavy topics whose weight threatens to capsize the second half of this collection. Sedaris is like the social director running around the deck of a listing cruise ship, frantically playing for laughs and doing jazz hands while the reader wonders whether he doesn’t know the ship is sinking or just refuses to acknowledge what’s going on ... he seems unequipped to deal with anything that heavy, as a prose stylist and maybe as a person.
