But when you’re dealing with a talent as outsize as Sedaris’s, even the missteps are fairly negligible. Similarly, his essentially gothic bent, when applied to an ongoing crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic, can yield statements that whiff faintly of cabbage. This is a promising direction, but I missed Sedaris’s personal connection to the topics of guns and school shootings in an essay about those topics. Some of the pieces in Happy-Go-Lucky seem transitional, as if Sedaris, having already secured his place as a chronicler of dysfunctional families and oddball enthusiasms, is casting his net wider by taking on societal issues. We also get the only truly offensive thing, to my knowledge, that Sedaris has ever written. We get a seeming resolution to Sedaris and his father’s lifelong grudge match when Lou tells David, 'You won.' We get vivid moments featuring Lou’s will and Tiffany’s accusations of sexual abuse Sedaris confesses to offering to pay for a 24-year-old store clerk to have his teeth fixed, and to long ago initiating a bizarre intergenerational family moment while wearing underpants that he’d cut the back out of. However, in addition to being consistently funny, it contains some festive Sedaris occasions for all those who celebrate. has fewer of these beautifully crafted jewel boxes than Calypso did.
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