Working on his morals
Squirrel seeks Chipmunk
By David Sedaris
159 pages
Available at National Book Store
What if Aesop had been a witty, urbane gay gent who wrote secretly coded social commentary in the guise of parables about cows and crows and sheep? Well, maybe the Greek inventor of fables was all those things. Or maybe he was reincarnated as David Sedaris, whose latest book, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, skirts the “children’s lit” category, after satirizing the rest of mankind in his essay collections.
Sedaris goes fictional here, but the voices and human situations definitely have that familiar ring, curse words and all. In fact, there’s a wee bit of danger of little kiddies picking up this wittily illustrated (by Ian Falconer, who drew the Olivia storybooks for kids) book and scanning the prose, thinking it’s “G” rated. It’s not, it’s “H” rated, for “human,” meaning this is the way adults really talk, if they were transmogrified into barnyard animals. They’re full of those qualities you don’t usually encounter in children’s books: anger, envy, lust, greed, sloth, gluttony. It’s as though Aesop were reborn as a chismis talk show host.
In short, don’t buy it for the kids; buy it for your wry best friend or gay officemate.
Sedaris has been chipping away at this collection for a while. When he visited the Philippines five years back for a book tour, the author of Me Talk Pretty One Day mentioned he was working on some fiction. “They’re fables,” he said, pausing for effect. “But I have to work on my morals.”
At first, I was worried that Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk might be a step down from Sedaris’s usual pithy dissection of human behavior. It’s pretty much the same, though, wrapped in familiar yet twisted fables with innocuous titles like “The Cat and the Baboon,” “The Motherless Bear,” “The Sick Rat and the Healthy Rat,” and “The Vigilant Rabbit.”
Cynical, subversive, yet still offering one moral per piece, these fables feel like Sedaris is describing the people in his neighborhood, his world. They may be dressed as lambs, parrots or potbellied pigs, but they have all the same symptoms of being human nonetheless. In fact, you might say Sedaris has actually broadened his writing to include the whole human race, rather than simply reflecting on his own life in his earlier essays. The odd couple in the title story, “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk,” are typically flummoxed by relationships. The two are out on a second or third date, and find they’re running out of things to talk about. The squirrel nervously blurts out, “I like jazz!” And the chipmunk, unfamiliar with the word, says she likes it too. Later, she assigns various meanings, increasingly dark and nasty, to the word:
What if jazz was squirrel slang for something terrible, like anal intercourse? “Oh, I like it, too,” she’d said and so eagerly! Then again, it could just be something mildly terrible, something along the lines of Communism or fortune-telling, subjects that were talked about but hardly ever practiced. Just as she thought she had calmed herself down, a new possibility would enter her mind, each one more horrible than the last. Jazz was the maggot-infested flesh of a dead body, the crust on an infected eye, another word for ritual suicide. And she had claimed to like it!
Sedaris has a sharp eye for evil, and it manifests itself mostly in the gossip and idle thoughts of animals. A flash of jealousy, a sense of superiority, a fascination with trends like pop psychology or meditation these are the things that usually lead to a moral collapse in these fables.
Don’t expect the good, wise or virtuous to always triumph in the end these aren’t fairy tales, after all. While at times reminiscent of Orwell’s Animal Farm, Sedaris to his credit is not that interested in making political statements or taking political sides (though he does lampoon heightened border security in the US in “The Vigilant Rabbit”). He knows what fools liberals, as well as conservatives, can be, and simply sits on the sidelines, taking notes.
There’s plenty of room for reflection on the sidelines, and it’s here that Sedaris goes from satire to human insight. Like the two chatty birds in “The Migrating Warblers” who wear out their welcome with endless stories about their travels. (Surely, Sedaris has been trapped between such a couple on a trans-Atlantic flight to Paris or back at some point?) But rather than simply lampooning them, he injects a bit of human truth: “The listeners would crack up, and the warblers, husband and wife, would enjoy the sensation of having an audience right where they wanted them. This was the reward for spending three months out of the year in an inferior country, and it almost made up for all the hardships the stomach flus, for instance, or the times when, rather than uniting you and your mate, the strangeness of another culture only made you feel more separate, more despicable and alone.”
Henry James couldn’t have said it better.
As fables go, most of these are detailed and well written. Some are base hits, some are home runs, and some are simply touching, like “The Faithful Setter,” in which a well-bred setter makes apologies for his coarse wife, who has had an affair with the neighbor, an English bull terrier. This leads to the wife having a litter of unwanted puppies, and the owner sending her off for a hysterectomy. Which leads to further resentment and sulking from the wife. The faithful setter ponders the odd nature of relationships when he spots a house fire on the way home after being taken out to “service” a female Irish setter across town. He sees the owner of the house clutching a smoky dachshund, the only thing she saved from the fire, leaving her teenage son to perish in the flames upstairs. (“I caught a glimpse of that poor guy’s future. I could have saved anything, and I saved you! Who wants to live with that kind of pressure?”) Later, the faithful setter heads home, “to return to my hangdog wife and continue the long business of loving her.”
It’s at moments like these that Sedaris seems to reveal so much of the human condition, carefully decked out in animal disguise.
