When You are Engulfed in Flames

Sedaris, David.  When You Are Engulfed in Flames.  New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008.

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When You Are Engulfed in Flames, David Sedaris‘s 2008 collection of stories/essays, is a quick read and a good laugh.  Sedaris’s recounting of how his partner, Hugh, has a tendency to walk at light speed when they are on vacation reminds me of family outings with my dad.  Sedaris’s efforts to develop an appreciation of fine art at a mall art print store in “Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool” are hilarious, not to mention the story’s title brings back memories of my high school’s bad poetry contest.  And the bad Japanese translations of English phrases in “The Smoking Section,” including procedures for how to react “when you are engulfed in flames” in your hotel room, will induce laughter in anyone familiar with foreign travel.

Unfortunately, humor alone does not make a good book.  My overall assessment of When You Are Engulfed in Flames is that it tries too hard and too overtly to achieve a degree of depth unsupported by its stories.  “That’s Amore,” for example, spends the bulk of its 25 pages building Sedaris’s crude and ornery neighbor, Helen, into a caricature — she gives disgusting, unsolicited food to Sedaris and Hugh, demands help with household chores, and continually stops by uninvited.  The last page of the story, though, seeks to engage Sedaris’s sense of guilt for not helping Helen with one final chore, tries to humanize in one paragraph a character built on irony and hyperbole, attempting a transformation of the laughable into the lovable that ultimately proves unsuccessful in the limited space Sedaris allots to it.  Other attempts appear simply disingenuous; indeed, Sedaris’s assertion in “April in Paris” that he worried more about Hurricane Katrina’s impact on spiders than on humans caused me to groan.  After reading works by authors who successfully blend humor and critique, laughter and depth (i.e. Sherman Alexie and Augusten Burroughs), When You Are Engulfed in Flames sadly does not measure up.

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