Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris (2022)

 This is my first Sedaris. It's quite hard, on the whole, to be reading such a thing in the same period of time as one is working through The Letters of Katherine Mansfield! The contrast is educative, and yet expected. Sedaris' style is essentially an emanation of the "21st century" ethos in literature (though he got going a tiny bit earlier). It is chatty and genial. Lite. Like the stuff you would expect from a friend over a restaurant table, but can see wouldn't translate into print well, if by 'well' one meant impressively, and if by 'impressively' one meant not only having impact, but also being genuinely, deeply comic, which is I think the aim. He has a walloping reputation for humour, and maybe this really hits when he is seen on stage, but this book is just......fairly superficial in the main. At least that would have been my whole summary if I'd only read to page 162. But with the piece 'Fresh Caught Haddock' and a couple after there is a lean into more gravitas. I don't know whether this is a deliberate move: 'allow the reader to become used to being a little mollified and glazed, then hit them with some slightly harder stuff'? The 'slightly' is key there, too. While entering this new territory and speaking of his father's end, his sister's suicide, we are also still treated to material about his teeth and a turd on the floor in a deserted airport, which would be quietly interesting when discussed orally (haha) with a friend, but are a little thin-on in text. I guess the question which then arises is 'what is "suitable material"?' And I guess it's this, if you are thrilled and pleased by that kind of thing. I suppose I'm one of those who want more. Picking other books off the shelves at the time of reading, and feeling the wateriness here by contrast. I don't feel illuminated. I wonder if he'll become another of those humorists who have quite a big catalogue (a la Patrick Campbell, or a good number of mid-20th century magaziney Americans) who are very popular in their times, but who go completely out of print once their era is over? It's a trope which resonates.