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“On the flyleaf to When You Are Engulfed in Flames, essayist David Sedaris is described as “master of nothing.” Nothing, that is, except entertaining me in book after book. While the 22 pieces in When You Are Engulfed in Flames may not be as gasp-inducing, laugh-out-loud funny as those in Barrel Fever, they employ the same distinctive voice that makes Sedaris so addictive -- brutally honest, pretty darn petty, and alternately self-loathing and misanthropic.
The details he reveals (such as his pet name for his boyfriend’s mother: Maw Humrick) create a level of intimacy that makes readers feel as if they are hearing a juicy secret. Characters and scenes are described in crisp, vivid language that creates an image as colorful and clear as a Polaroid picture. In “The Understudy,” for example, Sedaris quickly sketches babysitter Mrs. Peacock: “… the first thing I noticed was her hair, which was the color of margarine and fell in waves to the middle of her back. It was the sort of hair you might find on a mermaid, completely wrong for a sixty-year-old woman who was not just heavy but fat, and moved as if each step might be her last.” In “That’s Amore,” a touching tribute to his crotchety New York neighbor, Helen, Sedaris describes her tiny feet as “no longer than hot dog buns.” I’ll never look at a stick of Parkay or an Oscar Meyer Weiner the same way again.
The book’s longest essay, “The Smoking Section” chronicles Sedaris’s humiliating struggle to learn Japanese while living in Tokyo, the city to which he moved in his quest to quit smoking. In recalling his response to a kabuki performance, Sedaris neatly summarized my own reaction to his work: “You had to laugh, but at the same time you couldn’t help being moved.””
