RaveNew York Times Book Review... has fewer of these beautifully crafted jewel boxes than Calypso did. However, in addition to being consistently funny, it contains some festive Sedaris occasions for all those who celebrate ... We get a seeming resolution to Sedaris and his father’s lifelong grudge match when Lou tells David, \'You won.\' We get vivid moments featuring Lou’s will and Tiffany’s accusations of sexual abuse; Sedaris confesses to offering to pay for a 24-year-old store clerk to have his teeth fixed, and to long ago initiating a bizarre intergenerational family moment while wearing underpants that he’d cut the back out of. We also get the only truly offensive thing, to my knowledge, that Sedaris has ever written ... Some of the pieces in Happy-Go-Lucky seem transitional, as if Sedaris, having already secured his place as a chronicler of dysfunctional families and oddball enthusiasms, is casting his net wider by taking on societal issues. This is a promising direction, but I missed Sedaris’s personal connection to the topics of guns and school shootings in an essay about those topics. Similarly, his essentially gothic bent, when applied to an ongoing crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic, can yield statements that whiff faintly of cabbage ... But when you’re dealing with a talent as outsize as Sedaris’s, even the missteps are fairly negligible ... the lasting impression of “Happy-Go-Lucky” is similar to that of Sedaris’s other books: It’s a neat trick that one writer’s preoccupation with the odd and the inappropriate can have such widespread appeal. As Sedaris once replied to a store employee who’d asked him if he was looking for anything special when gift shopping, \'Grotesque is a plus.\'
Lynn Freed
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIf on its surface The Last Laugh is a warts-and-all repudiation of the late-in-life female empowerment yarn as typified by the movies Enchanted April and “Shirley Valentine,” the gimlet-eyed Freed is intent on something deeper and more unsettling. Can we ever really absent ourselves, even briefly, from the important people in our lives? Is it lunacy to think we have an essential self — a self that exists outside our relationships to other people? Why is freedom so terrifying? ... So chockablock is The Last Laugh with unregenerate characters saying off-putting or vile things to one another that this pantywaist reader occasionally longed for the quietudes found in the work of that other chronicler of women of a certain age, Barbara Pym ... In the end, Freed’s candor works to lift the veil off the misperception that life after 60 consists mostly of conversations about sciatica or ceaseless and slightly abject devotion to a tiny, shivery dog.
