Culture > Reviews

David Sedaris - The Santaland Diaries
A Lavender Salon book review
by John Olski
posted 1/16/04

Poet and critic Frank O'Hara supported his writing career with curatorial work at New York's Museum of Modern Art.  Armistead Maupin was a print journalist before serializing his Tales of the City.  Non-fiction author Dan Savage still writes a sex advice column.

And David Sedaris?  Well, the ironist and National Public Radio performer was once a Christmas elf for Macy's Department Store in New York City, ushering a broad spectrum of humanity to Santa Claus for little in the way of pay and career fulfillment.  The author and his elfin alias Crumpet (later Blisters) encountered misfortune and pettiness in a season that should have celebrated the human potential for joy and peace.  That contradiction drives The Santaland Diaries -- a perfect little vehicle for deadpan, dark humor and urban sensibility, provided that one likes that sort of thing.

Most Lavender Salon members thought David Sedaris hit his mark, spotlighting the thoughtless adherence Americans have to commercial Christmas traditions at the expense of Christmas spirit.  Two members were less impressed, however -- a circumstance mitigated somewhat by not only reading the piece, but also listening to the author's rendition.  Vocal inflection and characterization help clarify the tone of The Santaland Diaries, while the author's CD performance includes material not available to the reader, such as a fine impersonation of Billie Holiday singing a Christmas carol.

Keep in mind that good diaries are generally candid accounts based on first impressions of events.  The Santaland Diaries succeeds by conveying an immediate sense of frustration, playing on the reader's likely experience with dead-end jobs or holiday shoppers.  The drawback of Sedaris's approach, common to some of his other writings, is its sense of coldness: the author stays close to his immediate perceptions, remaining distant from readers who engage in deeper reflection.

Consider two Santaland episodes.  In one, a hired Santa encounters a group of children with disfigurements or missing limbs, and the man feels he must stop asking what the children would like for Christmas -- presumably, their limbs back.  It's heartbreaking humor, and it drew laughter from a number of Salon members.  In another episode, parents demand that their children get Santas of their own race, either European- or African-American.  Unfortunately, with all the costuming and makeup, the two available African-American Santas appear white.  Only one Salon member laughed at this, suggesting that others had a hard time finding humor in institutionalized discrimination.  What does the glut of Caucasian imagery in our cultural traditions suggest to African-Americans?  The Santaland Diaries may be too light as a narrative to adequately broach the topic.

Sedaris offers amusingly sad accounts of parents trying to get Christmas card poses from crying children, adults acting like children and supervisors treating employees like children.  It's funny because we've all been children.  When a group of severely retarded people visits Santa, Sedaris remarks that everyone looks retarded if one really thinks about it.  Is that funny?  Yes or no, it's definitely David Sedaris, who has only observed severely retarded people.

With The Santaland Diaries, David Sedaris wants us to look into a department store window.  The display is gaudy and the lighting has been adjusted so that we might see our own images in the glass.  How do we measure up?  Do we laugh at this, and not at that?  Do we appreciate the display?  Reflections in the glass are telling.