David Sedaris’ ‘Calypso’: Essays of humor, melancholy, and family

Calypso
By David Sedaris
Little Brown & Co. 259 pp. $28

Reviewed by Colette Bancroft
David Sedaris gets right to the point in the opening of the first essay in his new book, Calypso: "Though there's an industry built on telling you otherwise, there are few real joys to middle age. The only perk I can see is that, with luck, you'll acquire a guest room." Sedaris, a hugely popular performer and best-selling author, has acquired more than a guest room. In addition to homes in England and France, he tells us, a few years back he bought a big beach house on Emerald Isle in North Carolina, where his family vacationed when he was a kid. That house, bought as a new gathering spot for the Sedarises, serves as a center for this collection of essays, his first in five years.

Calypso is the most family-centered of his books yet. Although much of it is very funny, it's also his most melancholy, as it addresses aging and loss: The author is 61, his mother died of cancer in 1991, his youngest sister died by suicide in 2013, and his father is in his 90s.

Calypso ranges across a number of other subjects as well, often with Sedaris' trademark off-center, self-deprecating humor. In "Your English Is So Good," Sedaris, whose performances keep him on tour for months at a time, riffs on developing a course he calls American English for Business Travelers, as well as some warnings: "Increasingly at Southern airports, instead of a 'good-bye' or 'thank-you,' cashiers are apt to say, 'Have a blessed day.' This can make you feel like you've been sprayed against your will with God cologne."

"A Modest Proposal" is about his surprising reaction to marriage equality. "The Supreme Court ruling tells every gay fifteen-year-old living out in the middle of nowhere that he or she is as good as any other dope who wants to get married," he writes. "To me it was a slightly mixed message, like saying we're all equally entitled to wear Dockers to the Olive Garden."

One of the loveliest essays in the book, "Untamed," recounts the relationship he develops with a fox that visits the garden of his home in Sussex late at night. Sedaris names her Carol, but he resists sentimentalizing her, knowing that she really shows up because he feeds her: "That's the drawback but also the glory of creatures that were never domesticated. Nothing feels better than being singled out by something that at best should fear you and at worst would like to eat you."

But most of the essays deal in one way or another with his family. Sometimes they're mordantly funny, as when he tries to get his father to tell him more about his Greek grandmother: "I remember Yiayia saying some pretty rough things about black people, which is odd given her limited vocabulary. It's like she took English lessons from a Klan member but quit after the second day."

But many of them deal with grief and insight with his sister and mother. Tiffany, whose history of mental illness and substance abuse dated to her teens, had been estranged from various family members over the years. He is haunted even more by his mother, whom he clearly adored. In his dreams of her, he tells us, he updates her on family news and current events, like explaining what a selfie is: "They're pictures you take of yourself with a phone and send to the people you no longer communicate with by talking."

His relationship with his father was always more complicated. "I didn't feel completely unloved," he tells us. "If the house were on fire he would have dragged me out, though it would have been after he rescued everyone else, including the cat and dog." One essay, "The Silent Treatment," includes a horrifying account of how his father punished him for a teenage prank — then moves to a description of how the two of them bonded over jazz.

At one point, Sedaris describes walking home to his beach house in the dark, trying to spot it without familiar landmarks. Then he imagines strangers looking for their own house and passing his. "If it was smaller than the Sea Section, or less well positioned, they maybe looked up into our gaily lit windows and resented us, wondering, as we so often did ourselves these days, what we had done to deserve all this."

This review originally appeared in the Tampa Bay Times.