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7.09.07 & 7.16.07 Issue: Anderson's Super, and a Surfeit of Sedaris?
Filed under: Pick of the Issue Tagged: David Sedaris, Jon Lee Anderson
In which John Bucher, Martin Schneider (currently on Austrian holiday), and I review the high points and discuss the particulars of the issue you may just be getting to. We occasionally carp, but mostly we celebrate.
I never read thrillers growing up, unless you count the Hardy Boys. And no spy novels, apart from John LeCarré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which I had to read for a fourth-year class on espionage—the class I was in, incidentally, when the attacks of September 11 took place. I didn’t play with G.I. Joes, and, frankly, never understood the ecstasies my Egyptian friend Kareem found in them, flinging himself, and the figurines, around the pool deck at his Toronto home, spittle flying from his mouth—rat-tat-tat-tat-tat, Snake Eyes…noooo!!!
So I was unprepared, at least in a literary sense, for Jon Lee Anderson’s ducking, barrel-rolling, ricocheting account (audio here) of American opium eradication efforts in Afghanistan, “The Taliban’s Opium War.” About midway through the piece, the prose turned all And then we heard an explosion over the ridge; there were shell casings and bone fragments all around. We poked our head out of the foxhole, and I had to remind myself that I wasn’t reading a paperback I’d found wedged between two bus seats. And just seconds after that admittedly disparaging thought, I had another: Shit, the guy got shot at, for four hours, in Afghanistan. He’s got more street cred—field cred, whatever—than Fifty. —JB
I’m a fan of David Sedaris, and in part because the Greyhound bus system and I have recently been excessively intimate, I’ve been catching up on old episodes of This American Life. I’m always glad to hear a Sedaris segment is coming up; I relish his clever, absorbing, self-aware, drolly delivered spoken monologues. So maybe that’s why “This Old House” went down the wrong way—it’s quite possible I’ve just hit my Sedaris quota for the month. But I think it might have more to do with Sedaris’s characterization of “Rosemary Dowd” (a needlessly unkind, and comically unnecessary, pseudonym), his antiques-obsessed landlady. She’s the hero of the story, then she’s discarded as evidence that Sedaris still had some growing up to do. I was sad for poor Rosemary, the crumbling symbol of remembrance. And it reminded me again that I would love to see more of these personal histories and reflections from people who are ladies themselves. —EG
Comments
I’m not sure what the objection is to “Rosemary Dowd.” Not because of Maureen Dowd, is it? Or is that Elwood P. Dowd’s sister’s name (in “Harvey”)?
I didn’t like the story, however. There was a slightly cruel and unthinking side to it: in fact, in the end he compares the “set” and “characters” to a cross between a Carson MacCullers and a Tennessee Williams, and yet his story has none of the acute sensitivity of either. Maybe that’s what got your goat. He usually redeems himself with a keen, tenderhearted insight in the end, if he depicts himself as, say, an insensitive and ignorant youth (who would wonder why a half-Korean didn’t know who Charlie Chan was). But there was no such redemption in the end of this story, so he appeared to be treating this episode in his life as if it had been an episode of some TV show — like, “look, the people in my life are just so much quirky material for my storytelling, and so much so that nobody really believes I’m telling the truth!” And yet the people in this story didn’t get their due credit, did they?
I meant as in “dowdy”—it seemed like an uncharacteristically unsubtle shortcut to foreshadow her eventual outing as a typical small-town hag who has no idea that her delusions of glamor are preposterous and risible. Delta Dawn, what’s that flower you got on? Were you once a pretty girl with your own dreams, but now more “like snow that had been peed on”? I think she deserves better than that, and Sedaris, who does, after all, have a kooky woman for a fabulously successful sister, might have taken down his revulsion for eccentric aging just a hair.
I see! I hadn’t thought about the “dowdy” in the “dowd”! Well, I maintain that his narration in this story is one of unsympathetic detachment, even though he’s literally been touched, picked up, fed, entertained and confided in by the people he lived with. He’s a passive narrator in a silly hat, a sort of court jester offering us some vicarious bemusement as he tells of his adventures in this house. Normally he could’ve made that observation about the hair/snow and made the reader feel sort of guilty and pained for being amused by the clever comparison.