The Book-a-Week Project, Week 21

The Columnist
Jeffrey Frank

This is the second book I've read because it was recommended by David Sedaris. The first was the miserable Jenny and the Jaws of Life by Jincy Willett. I need to consider and remember that because an author is influential doesn't mean she's similar, because while I've rarely met anyone who found David Sedaris anything less than knee-slappingly funny, Jincy Willett would only be funny to someone who, like the lead singer of Barenaked Ladies, is the kind of guy to laugh at a funeral. A clown's funeral, perhaps, but not just any funeral. Not me.

The Columnist is also very different from Sedaris' humor, but in a different way from Willett's book. It's a fictional autobiography narrated by a self-aggrandizing newspaper columnist, detailing his manipulative relationships -- romantically, professionally, and socially -- calculated to gain him public influence and prominent social status. His pomposity and obliviousness to his own motives is amusing, but not much more than that and not for very long. If I'm going to read stories narrated by a pretentious ass, I prefer the blunt egotism of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature or the madcap recklessness of P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. Don't you? Yes, it turns out you do.

The Columnist was a waste of time. We hate it, don't we? Yes, it turns out we really, really do. But we still love David Sedaris in spite of his poor taste.