Kevin Kopelson Sedaris. University of Minnesota Press.

Welcome to the academy, Mr. Sedaris. For years now, I and uncountable numbers of my colleagues have been teaching David Sedaris's books and essays in undergraduate English courses. They're funny, for starters, which always helps get students' attention, but they're not just funny. The stories and essays in Sedaris's six books—Barrel Fever (1994), Naked (1997), Holidays on Ice (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004), and When You Are Engulfed in Flames (2008)— accomplish the same kind of feat we like to see from student writing: they engage in the outer world through the inner self, resulting in a new understanding of both. Sedaris can write about a draconian speech therapist trying almost to beat the lisp out of him ("Go Carolina," from Me Talk Pretty One Day), and as we laugh at her expense, we see how such an episode has sustained this comic narrator as much as it may have scarred him.

Until now, there's been nothing in the realm of critical material on Sedaris's work, nothing but book reviews and author interviews to guide readers in their approach to the work. Enter Kevin Kopelson, a writer and queer theorist, whose Sedaris takes a close, critical look at the entirety of Sedaris's work published to the date of this book. Kopelson is clear about his goal up front: he wants "to articulate why many of us not so much like as love Sedaris. Love him, no doubt, far more than we do less autobiographical [. . .] writers" (2). In short: he's writing as a fan, and while this helps make his book very approachable to other devoted Sedaris fans, it's a move that ultimately hinders Kopelson's analysis.

By now Sedaris's response to the question of whether his stories are true has become legendary enough to make the fave-quotes boxes of blogs and MySpace pages: "I prefer to say they are true enough." And while I hope not to devolve in this review to a semantic argument on the precise meaning of that "creative" in "creative nonfiction," I do think it's fair to assume that some portion of the events and details in his essays come from his admittedly delightful imagination, and thus that straight biographical readings of Sedaris using only these inventive essays as source material are going to raise a whole slew of questions.

One such question, of course, is how much of this can we believe? The answer is either all of it—if you're inclined to read stories for the story—or none of it, if you're a stickler for the facts. One certainty is that analysis of Sedaris's essays cannot lead us to truths or understandings about David Sedaris, the bestselling author. They can only lead us to understandings about "David Sedaris," the narrative persona.

Kopelson seems to ignore this in his project of psychoanalytic readings of Sedaris's relationships with his family and friends. The bulk of Kopelson's book consists of close readings of dozens of Sedaris's essays, forming a kind of corpus of All That We Know about the Sedarises. He spells out which sister is the oldest (Lisa) and how David's relationship with her differs from that with Amy, the other famous sibling (from Strangers with Candy, among other projects). He spells out how Lou, the father, reacted to David's coming out, and how Sharon, the mother, acted differently.

All along, the figure ostensibly being uncovered is David Sedaris the bestselling author, even when I think that author is encouraging us not to read his essays as true confessions. For example, in "Possession," Sedaris visits Anne Frank's house with his partner, Hugh, with whom he's recently been looking all over Paris for a new apartment. Turns out the Franks had a nice setup, and much of the humor of the essay comes from Sedaris's feigned inability to grasp the severity of their situation as he's too busy figuring out which walls he'd tear down to open up the rooms a little. It is, like all his essays (so many of which were first aired on public radio), a performance. Sedaris is very much a performer and a humorist. He knows how to tell a good joke, which is why he writes the following, at the very end of the essay after learning that a neighbor turned the Franks in: "I looked out the window, wondering who could have done such a thing, and caught my reflection staring back at me. Then, beyond that, across the way, I saw the most beautiful apartment" (qtd. in Kopelson 188). We read it as a punch line and not a factual account because the line operates exactly as a punch line should—it distills the entirety of the essay-joke into one quotable, incongruous statement.

Though he has many smart things to say about the limitations of sentimentality, Kopelson doesn't seem much interested in investigating this way Sedaris sets us up for sentimental feeling and then pulls the rug out from under us, reminding us we're in the land of jokes and humor. He's too busy mining the above episode for evidence of whether Sedaris actually felt sympathy that day he toured the Anne Frank house. A similar problem is raised throughout the book every time Kopelson reads the stories (that is, the fictional short stories from Sedaris's first book, Barrel Fever) for autobiographical insight. "I base this claim not on autobiography but autobiographical fiction" (103), he writes at one point. "Certain truths [. . .] need masks" (103). This is a dangerous practice, denying as it does the ability for writers of fiction or nonfiction to write from points of view they do not share, experiences with which they have no direct experience. Sedaris is now writing animal fables. Will Kopelson give these stories equal, autobiographical treatment?

This distinction between Sedaris the writer and Sedaris the persona is brought up; Kopelson gives examples in which Sedaris himself discusses his separation of identities. But rather than use these examples as jumping off points for further analysis, Kopelson delivers a string of quotes from La Rochefoucauld, Salinger, Proust, Barthes, and Nietzsche. It's hardly the right tactic in a book "meant for the general or nonacademic reader in general" (4), and then the chapter is over, and the issue is never again raised.

It's an odd move, because Kopelson is a writer who likes to ensure the points he makes are crystal clear. A connection between Sedaris's mother's apology for her husband's homophobia ("I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.") and Sedaris's own apology for stealing his sister's stories ("Forgive me. Forgive me. Forgive me.") is made no fewer than three times. And though he writes in his introduction that Sedaris is not a work of queer theory and does not follow the deconstructive project of his other books, Kopelson can't help himself when it comes to some deconstructive bits of groan-worthy wordplay. Sedaris's sister Amy is called "ami-able," for instance, and "thespian" is punned on in the standard way of tenth-graders.

Admittedly, the book is a "performative" text; Kopelson has some personal projects to undergo as well as critical ones. (He's mourning the death of his father, much in the way that Sedaris's books mourn the passing of his mother.) But too often this performance leads not to candor or personal confession but to showing off. In Sedaris's essays from Paris, where he now lives for most of the year, Kopelson feels the need to translate the translations—that is, what Sedaris gives us as English ("You now need to deliver the afterbirth"), Kopelson translates back to the French, to the medical dictionary from which Sedaris learned the phrase. And why the mention that Sedaris's essay "Who's the Chef?" refers to the eighties sitcom "Who's the Boss?" Or the bold claim that Sedaris is "a bottom—not to mention a size queen" (196)?

Moments such as these appear in Sedaris with a troublesome regularity, and it's not simply a matter of Kopelson coming across as some kind of know-it-all—a "snob," whom he at one point claims this book is meant for. Rather, it creates an authorial persona that stands at such odds with that created by Sedaris that in time one feels like putting this book back on the shelf and picking up one by the latter. Sedaris is often cruel and often judgmental, but one thing he is careful never to come across as is a know-it-all. Indeed, one of the reason readers like him so much is the way he delivers his satire only after a serving of self-deprecation. "Sedaris calls himself an asshole" (1) is the way Kopelson puts it in his opening sentence, and yet this important lesson seems not to have stuck.

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