Barrel Fever

Barrel Fever - David Sedaris

This is a collection of stories and essays by this generation's Mark Twain. When we read the newspaper, we sometimes come across an odd story like “A police officer was forced to resign on Wednesday for having sex with a prostitute at a building he had been sent to investigate to see if it was a brothel.” We wonder whether the people involved just went temporarily nuts or if their craziness had been part of lives for a long time.

Sedaris shows us how people find themselves in odd predicaments, mainly because they don't see themselves as strange or contemplating nutty actions. To save his infant nephew from neglect and abuse, a young man figures he will get away with kidnapping the baby. A cheapskate father saves dough by doing surgery at home on his daughter, using yarn for stitches. A teenage girl leaves a suicide note to be read at her funeral, one designed to exact revenge and start a brawl.

Sedaris writes about the angry, the lost, the drunk, all back in the old neighborhood that we are glad we don't know anymore. Unsettling that these people are so alone that they have nobody to tell them, "Hey, what you're doing is really out there, ya know." This collection of humor will bring to mind Hubert “Requiem for a Dream” Selby sooner than Garrison “Tame PBS” Keillor.