The Book-a-Week Project, Week 21

The Columnist
Jeffrey Frank

This is the second book I've read because it was recommended by David Sedaris. The first was the miserable Jenny and the Jaws of Life by Jincy Willett. I need to consider and remember that because an author is influential doesn't mean she's similar, because while I've rarely met anyone who found David Sedaris anything less than knee-slappingly funny, Jincy Willett would only be funny to someone who, like the lead singer of Barenaked Ladies, is the kind of guy to laugh at a funeral. A clown's funeral, perhaps, but not just any funeral. Not me.

The Columnist is also very different from Sedaris' humor, but in a different way from Willett's book. It's a fictional autobiography narrated by a self-aggrandizing newspaper columnist, detailing his manipulative relationships -- romantically, professionally, and socially -- calculated to gain him public influence and prominent social status. His pomposity and obliviousness to his own motives is amusing, but not much more than that and not for very long. If I'm going to read stories narrated by a pretentious ass, I prefer the blunt egotism of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature or the madcap recklessness of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. Don't you? Yes, it turns out you do.

The Columnist was a waste of time. We hate it, don't we? Yes, it turns out we really, really do. But we still love David Sedaris in spite of his poor taste.

The Book-a-Week(?) Project, Week 20

In Persuasion Nation: Stories
George Saunders

If George Saunders were Willy Wonka, I would have already ballooned up like a gigantic blueberry or gotten my fat ass sucked up the chocolate pipe. This is his most recent book, and the best. These stories have urgency to them that didn't seem so desperate in previous collections. Death pops up more frequently ("Brad Carrigan, American"). Humans are at their cruellest, both to other humans ("CommComm") and to animals ("The Red Bow" and the somewhat puzzling inclusion "93990", which details LD50 experiments that one primate is mysteriously unaffected by).

The joy remains, however. When George Saunders loses hope, the world is truly irredeemable.

Next, maybe The Columnist by Jeffery Frank, or Your Disgusting Head by Dr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey.

Incidentally

I own an American flag and it resides in a box of dried opium poppy stalks. It's not a statement about the American government's drug trade complicity or addiction or nationalism or cardboard boxes. It just fell in there and I never bothered to take it out.