Two collections of essays delve into the authors' psyches—and those of their parents
by Phillip Rhodes
Be forewarned: Under no circumstances should you curl up on the couch with a glass of milk and a box of vanilla wafers and attempt to read Me Talk Pretty One Day (Little, Brown, $22.95). You'll get about five pages in to the first essay, "Go Carolina," and if caught in the middle of a mouthful, you're certain to snort whatever liquid you've been drinking all over the page as David Sedaris recounts his torture at the hands of "Agent Samson," his cruelly sadistic childhood speech therapist. The young Sedaris is forced to undergo a battery of exercises designed to eradicate the pernicious lisps of little boys who, "When asked what we wanted to be when we grew up ... hid the truth and listed who we wanted to sleep with when we grew up. 'A policeman or a fireman or one of those guys who works with high-tension wires.'"
The first half of Me Talk Pretty One Day finds the former NPR commentator skewering his now familiar familial targets—the tough-talking, cigarette-smoking mother who can wither the smallest of hopes with one dead-pan barb, the obsessive-compulsive father who drags the entire family into his bizarre fixations, various and sundry sisters, and the redneck brother whose entire vocabulary consists of a blue blaze of curses.
Part deux finds Sedaris occupying France with a new boyfriend. Miraculously, the French (the butt of so many American jokes) manage to dodge his poisonous barbs; they're reserved instead for himself as he attempts to learn the language or navigate the stereotypes of Americans abroad ("If I was pushy, it was typical; and if I wasn't, it was probably due to Prozac.").
The key to Sedaris' humor is good, old-fashioned directness, only his forthright statements are born out of a uniquely off-kilter point of view that often strikes even closer to the truth than flat-out spade-calling. Direct can be mean, and mean can be funny as hell. Sedaris is an absolute master; his acidic insight is as sharp as his tongue. One well-placed turn of phrase changes the whole childlike tone of a passage, rendering it deadly mean—and hysterically funny.
But what keeps him from descending into simple mean-spiritedness is the self-effacing tone. Sedaris is just as likely to turn his killer wit on himself as he is the crass, bumbling American couple of "Picka Pocketoni" who mistake him for a native and feel free to say things like, "'Peeeew... This little froggy is ripe.'"
Like the best-selling Naked, Sedaris' 1998 collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day is laugh-out-loud funny. Admittedly it lacks a little bit for freshness—Sedaris isn't covering much new ground here—but the book's amusingly dead-on, yet affectingly tender approach strikes an internal chord as much as it tickles the funny bone.
On the other hand, Brett Leveridge isn't nearly as funny as his publishers seem to think he is. The Might magazine columnist and author of www.brettnews.com has taken the one-trick-pony idea that made him a minor Web celebrity—recounting the tales of his Mom's romantic adventures—and compiled his columns into a book, Men My Mother Dated and Other Mostly True Tales (Villard Books, $19.95)
With its hip, retro cover art—a collage of toothsome, Bryll-creamed 1950s clones—Men My Mother Dated looks like it might be an hysterical send-up of divorce culture, an amusingly Oedipal homage, or a trashy take on the "Mommy Dearest" tell-all. But it's not anything like that. In the end, these simple tales are just as goofy as the cover models' grins.
Once past an insipid introduction from Bob Costas and Leveridge's seemingly endless dedication list (an extremely annoying, indulgent trend in recent books that must be stopped), Men gets off to a succinct start. In a single page—half that if you count the blank space for the page's header—Leveridge relates the story of bachelor number one, Bob Petronick. Bob escorts Mom to her first frat party, where after numerous beers, Mom becomes "embroiled in a hair-pulling, eye-gouging catfight." She gets arrested and dropped in the drunk tank. Bob bails her out, but never calls for a follow-up date, leaving Mom with "thirty hours' community service, six months' probation, and a reputation."
Period. That's it; on to bachelor number two, and so on.
There is a wistful, homespun air about the book, but it's mostly conveyed through the shockingly dull sentence structure. Leveridge is no Garrison Keillor. "Mom did... Mom thought..." This fill-in-the-blank pattern goes on and on, only occasionally casting a gentle, drowsy net over a particular reminiscence.
To her credit, Leveridge's mysterious mother comes off quite clean. She's savvy but chaste. But since she's seen only through the misty lens of her son's point of view and never speaks, her mysteriousness becomes problematic. The effect is that of watching Nick at Night on mute. You see the idealized June Cleaver bustling around the kitchen in her pearls, but you can't hear a word she's saying.
Then, just when you've settled into the bachelor parade pattern, the book suddenly shifts gears to the "other mostly true tales" part. It's an exasperatingly abrupt turn. And that's unfortunate, since this is by far the best part of Men My Mother Dated. Leveridge's plodding tone manages to make these short essays somewhat charming and heartfelt. He covers a lot of modern life's ground, moving from the effects of mistakenly gay identity in "Gay Like Me" to the mildly clever cultural commentary of "When Animals Attack Bob Saget".
Ultimately, Men My Mother Dated comes off as two half-books instead of one whole. Ho-hum. Better luck next time.
July 27, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 30
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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