WARNING: Plot spoilers ensue.
David Sedaris was in Toronto last weekend to read from his latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk. I'd like to begin by saying that the reading was just excellent; Sedaris has a quirky sort of stage presence, combined of more or less unequal parts of golden comedic timing, self-effacing asides, and what he claims a listener to have described as a "Muppet" voice. These are all presented with a sort of seriousness, however, belied by the occasional snicker at a particularly absurd turn of phrase.
Needless to say, I was delighted by his reading. I'm always a little nervous before a reading begins; not everyone is instructed in or practices the art of reading aloud, and it can drastically alter the way I receive a story on re-reading post-reading. I leave it to you to untangle that. But Sedaris reads as he writes, and had the humility—arguably unnecessary in what is obviously a tour of promotion—to give some of his reading away. Granted, it was another form of self-promotion, but still; I appreciated his enthusiasm for the other voices on his latest audio book.
But what, you ask, does this have to do with his book?
Well, a fair bit. I purchased the book right before the reading, and hadn't had a chance to glance through it. So I didn't notice at the time that he was leaving pieces out, ending stories early, and that the omissions changed the stories. It was only while waiting in the idolatrous line afterward that I began reading. Actually, the line was so long that I read almost all of the "bestiary" by the time I made it to Sedaris's "friendly friendship," a self-consciously anthropomorphized series of short stories about animals as people. As Sedaris introduced (imagine square brackets, as this is a week-old paraphrase), "I was going to call them fables, except that I think I'm too immoral." So I won't call them fables, either; maybe ineffables. This collection is distinctly different from any of the others I've read; rather than a series of sidesplitting essays explicitly about the adventures of Sedaris et al, the reader is introduced to the interanimal relations of a wide array of humanimals. "The Squirrel and the Chipmunk," for example, from which the title and fantastic (heh) cover illustration by Ian Falconer is taken, describes an interspecies romance cut short by the prejudices of family...and by jazz:
The chipmunk lay awake that night, imagining the unpleasantness that was bound to take place the following morning. What if jazz was squirrel slang for something terrible, like anal intercourse? "Oh, I like it to," she'd said—and so eagerly! Then again, it could just be mildly terrible, something along the lines of Communism or fortune-telling, subjects that were talked about but hardly ever practiced. Just as she thought she had calmed herself down, a new possibility would enter her mind, each one more horrible than the last. Jazz was the maggot-infected flesh of a dead body, the crust on an infected eye, another word for ritual suicide.* And she had claimed to like it!
The chipmunk is persuaded by the intolerance of her family and her own lack of education about squirrels and their culture to break it off. She eventually marries another chipmunk, has a family, and eventually uncovers the meaning of jazz, first as a genre of music, and then in her own personal revisionist narrative:
When her muzzle grew more white than brown, the chipmunk forgot that she and the squirrel had had nothing to talk about. She forgot the definition of "jazz" as well and came to think of it as every beautiful thing she had ever failed to appreciate: the taste of warm rain; the smell of a baby; the din of a swollen river, rushing past her tree and onward to infinity.
The story ends on this note of potential and mourning, and a touch of senility, and is therefore representative of not only the collection as a whole, but also Sedaris's reading. If these stories were sonnets, they would be Elizabethan instead of Petrarchan, with a beautifully macarbre volta in the reader's last breath.
Though remarkably problematic from an ecocritical perspective—something that I hope to pursue in more depth later—this collection forwards brilliantly Sedaris's past thematic criticism of human intolerance. By displacing the stories via species, the bestiary invokes a sort of Jamesonian remove—though not temporal—for the reader, who is encouraged to laugh at his or her own foibles and follies. And, as is usual with Sedaris but particularly sinister in this collection, this laughter is complicated by the illumination of darker underlying normative prejudices and truths, made palatable—and unexpulsable—by its seductive comedy.
Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, I pronounce thee a success, a tragicomedy for the twenty-first century dissatisfied adult. Read the stories alone, aloud, or alchemically; they're worth the time.
*Here, I would like to just acknowledge the recent public response to the series of suicides prompted by heteronormative intolerance, and to extend my condolences to the families and friend of the youths. Also, I would like to link to some resources that might be of use to anyone struggling with similar issues. There is a community for you.
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