I don’t mean to come off as pretentious, but when a person on a social networking site list their favorite books as The Da Vinci Code and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, I expect to see Maroon 5 in their favorite music.
Once a darling of the NPR set, David Sedaris became the writer equivalent of those Luden cough drops: sweet, but without much purpose. Sure, his writing was likable and engaging, but really, there was no substance to it.
But my opinion about David Sedaris has changed. I’m starting to see David Sedaris as a gay Philip Roth. In the same way that Roth’s religion is taken for granted in his work, so is Sedaris’s sexuality. In his last two stories for the New Yorker, Sedaris mentions Hugh without explaining that he is gay or that Hugh is his long time partner.
As Sedaris has moved away from (or run out of) hyperbolic stories from his youth, he has become a writer who represents a certain demographic but speaks to all of us.