The thing about most books of single-author essays is that you cannot just sit down and read through the essays without the writing style and/or topics and/or general take on life, becoming very repetitive.  So over the past two days I switched back and forth between the essays in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (published in 2006) by David Foster Wallace and the ones in When You Are Engulfed in Flames (published in 2008) by David Sedaris.  Two conclusions I reached: first, these two writers are opposites in just about everything; and second, that David Sedaris is repetitive and has become quite boring, no matter how much I interspersed his works with Foster Wallace’s (or the Sunday comics or Home and Garden or the New York Times Book Review, I was getting desperate to avoid Sedaris), and that Foster Wallace is not repetitive and never boring: I read his essays in huge and satisfying gulps of reading.

Foster Wallace was hard working and thorough and wide-ranging in his topics; even when he returned to topics previously covered, like tennis or politics, the essays are new in their explorations and conclusions, and in the insight offered.  Foster Wallace’s footnotes can be annoying but they can also be ignored or read later, for another hour spent enthralled by the information contained therein.  Sedaris seems to get more and more lazy, giving us the same old story in new hashings: his crazy family, Hugh, Normandy, Paris…blahblahblah for the third or fourth time. He was fanatically funny in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim but he needs to dig deeper now, and tell us a real and genuine story, not cute bits from his life that seem made up and if real, seem petty and trivial.  He describes a kabuki performance in his interminable self-absorbed essay entitled, “The Smoking Section”, writing that “..you had to laugh, but at the same time you couldn’t help being moved.  And that I think, is pretty much the essence of a good show.”  That is also the essence of a good comic writer: make me laugh but please, move me too with some humanity.  Even when describing the museum at Hiroshima, Sedaris fails to move the reader at all, and it is in incredibly bad taste that immediately after the section on the museum in Hiroshima he makes jokes about the instructions in his hotel room there about what to do “When you are engulfed in flames.”

Foster Wallace has a great essay on Tracy Austin in Consider the Lobster, turned me off eating lobster forever in the title essay (interesting fact learned that lobster used to be so plentiful it was considered food for the poor, ground up and fed in bulk for protein), had me laughing and cringing in “Big Red Son”, and re-inspired me to read Dostoevsky all over again in “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” (this desire to re-read Dostoevsky was helped by Coetzee’s book Master of Petersburg).  He also answers his own question about who would dare today to write like Dostoevsky “a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction [that is] also ingenious and radiantly human”: Foster Wallace got there with his non-fiction and if he had stayed alive, maybe he could have with his fiction.

For a wonderful book of personal essays that are genuine and moving and also funny at times, read Plum Brandy by Josip Novakovich.