Me Talk Pretty One Day

'Welcome to the wonderful world of America's foremost humorist' gushes the back cover, 'where life is littered with idiosyncratic delights.' Luckily, Sedaris's fourth collection of deadpan semi-autobiographical pieces delivers much more than this anodyne blurb suggests. Sedaris is Edgar Allen Poe as adapted by John Waters, or an episode of Seinfeld scripted by Flannery O'Connor. No wait, he's Charles Adams meets The Simpsons. At any rate, 'idiosyncratic' doesn't quite describe him. Sedaris begins by recounting his childhood battle with a speech therapist. A confirmed lisper, he outwits the enemy - and increases his vocabulary - by avoiding words that contain the letter 's'. Young David then terrifies his guitar teacher, a chain-smoking macho midget, by singing advertising jingles for processed meat in a Billie Holiday voice. The alternative world of David Sedaris is peopled with the damaged and damaging, but somehow he's witty with it. I gawped at his affinity for skin rashes, war wounds and rusty cranial saws (I wasn't kidding about Charles Adams) and nodded appreciatively as he outlined his contempt for computers and cyberspace. The Sedaris family provides a lot of raw comic material: 'the Rooster' (David's ultra foul-mouthed brother), his wacko sister (who jumps out of a subway car with a cheery 'Good luck beating that rape charge, David') and his jazz-obsessed father (unnaturally close to the family's Great Dane). Eventually he moves from North Carolina to New York and then from the Big Apple to France. The French chapters inject a new ironic energy as he attempts to learn the language ('me talk pretty one day') and is called upon to defend US foreign policy at dinner parties where everyone has had too much to drink. The chapter in which he's mistaken by an American tourist for a Parisian pickpocket is a particular delight. (Kirkus UK)