Me Talk Pretty One Day

David Sedaris

I was led to expect a humorous book about the trials of learning French - the title, for a start, and various recommendations - but it doesn't quite turn out like that. Yes, a good third of it centres on American humorist David Sedaris's life in France and his quest to learn French but the rest of it is a bit of a mixed sac. It's very funny in places but there's something about the overall format which doesn't quite work. It struck me as a book which had a beginning but no middle and no end.

Its couple of dozen chapters start off loosely chronologically. We get some funny episodes in his childhood in Carolina. Then some of the weird things he did as a student. Then Sedaris's first couple of dead-end jobs in New York (both very funnily retold). At this point Sedaris seems to have hit some kind of writer's block and it's as if someone just said to him "ah, just write anything that's ever happened to you or to someone you know that was funny". There's the French stuff. There are essays on subjects as mixed as pets and crossword solving. It's mostly charming and amusingly self-deprecating but inevitably the project sags in one or two places.

Near the end Sedaris manages nearly twenty pages describing his various fantasies of power, wealth and fame and, again, its cleverly written but there's the whiff of "filler" about it. The funniest chapter of all is also the last one. It describes his father's lifelong habit of buying half-price black bananas and reduced price meat that's on the turn. Yeah, I know it doesn't sound like much but I was giggling all the way through. And then, suddenly, the book ends.

Sedaris is clearly a hell of a lot smarter than he makes himself out to be in this book. I bet his French isn't half as poor, either, as he pretends.