“SantaLand” led to an ongoing gig with NPR and some heavy breathing from Hollywood, including a call from actor Matthew Modine, who took a liking to another of Sedaris’s essays, a reflection on a lifelong association with cigarettes called “Diary of a Smoker.” (“Picturing [Mom] without a cigarette was like trying to imagine her on water skis.”) Modine has converted the essay into a 13-minute film that was shown at the Sundance Film Festival in January and began playing on PBS last month. Now both “Smoker” and “Santa/Land” have found a permanent home in _B_Barrel Fever b(196 pages. Little, Brown. $19.95), a sly collection of essays and short stories that has slipped onto best-seller lists in Chicago and San Francisco. Sedaris still cleans apartments for $10 an hour, but come on: iron your own damn shirts.
The “Barrel Fever” jacket copy tells us Sedaris’s writing is “infused with . . . empathy,” which is dead wrong, thank God. His funniest short stories concern characters wallowing gloriously in self-delusion. A deranged grad student stalks a beloved writer. A man recently on “Oprah” waxes about the affairs he had with Mike Tyson, Charlton Heston and Bruce Springsteen (“I was the boss when Bruce and I were together”). And a hilariously paranoid office worker publishes “Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter, Vol. 3, No. 2,” in which he chronicles the abuse he’s suffered at the hands of everyone from his boss to his butcher, as well as recounting the unwelcome romantic overtures of “that casserole-wielding mastodon, Melinda Delvecchio.” Sedaris is perhaps too fond of high-concept premises – two of his stories are newsletters, one’s an Oscar acceptance speech and one’s a posthumous letter read at a wake – and he tends to eschew deep thoughts, splashing instead at the shallow end of the pool. Still, there’s something delicious about the way he lampoons his characters, the way he lets everybody burn on their own private bonfire of vanity. This is a writer who’s cleaned our toilets and will never look at us the same way.
