A great essayist can expose the less palatable parts of their personality and still be funny enough not to alienate their readers. David Sedaris more than succeeds on this front in his winning, sometimes ill-tempered and frequently hilarious new collection, The Land And Its People. Documenting everything from his fraught childhood with a difficult-to-please father to the humbling trials of late middle age, Sedaris takes readers on a touchingly honest journey through life’s peaks and troughs.
Equally compelling when documenting a humdrum car journey as he is when recounting the time he got bitten on the leg by a drug addict’s dog, Sedaris is a masterful storyteller with the ability to mine gold from both the mundane and the absurd. There’s plenty of star power here too. Sedaris trades jokes with Stephen Colbert and meets Pope Francis, and his old agent rubbed shoulders with everyone from Walt Whitman to ‘Jerry’ Salinger. But it’s when Sedaris is ruminating on the minutiae of everyday life that this book really shines. Holden Caulfield would be proud.
Whether he’s lying about having cancer to avoid getting mugged or arguing in bad French with an AI assistant on Duolingo, Sedaris is always outrageous and highly entertaining company. If only every land contained more people like him.
