Clara’s Verdict
I came to Happy-Go-Lucky expecting to laugh and found myself listening to a book about a dead father. That is not a complaint. It is the most interesting thing about this collection, and it is the thing the publisher copy is too polite to say directly. The essays open in familiar territory: Sedaris learning to shoot with his sister, picking through muddy flea markets in Serbia, feeding gummy worms to ants, telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. Then the pandemic arrives, the touring stops, and the register changes underneath you.
At seven and a half hours it is a compact collection, and a 4.5 average across nearly seven thousand ratings is a solid rather than rapturous figure for a writer with this kind of following. My own view is that this is the collection where the comic apparatus is doing the least work and the writing is doing the most. Whether that is what you want from him is genuinely a matter of taste, and I would not pretend otherwise.
About the Audiobook
The book is built around a hinge. The opening essays belong to a world the copy describes in the past tense, when restaurant menus were still printed on paper and a mask was a Halloween decision. Then lockdown lands and Sedaris, unable to tour and read to audiences, loses the part of the work he loves most. What he does with that is characteristic: he walks for miles through an emptied city smelling only his own breath, vacuums the flat twice a day, fails entirely to hoard anything, and wonders how sex workers and acupuncturists are getting through quarantine.
The second movement is stranger and better. As the world resettles he finds himself altered. An offer to fix a stranger’s teeth is rebuffed, so he straightens his own teeth instead and goes out with new confidence. And, newly orphaned, he starts working through what that actually means. The publisher’s summary breaks off mid-sentence at exactly this point on the listing, which is an irritating place for it to stop, since the paternal material is the collection’s centre of gravity.
What I would say about the structure is that it rewards being heard in order, which is not always true of Sedaris. Individual essays stand alone perfectly well, and in a looser collection you could shuffle them without loss. Here the accumulation matters. The wheelchair jokes early on read differently once you have reached the essays about the death, and the retrospective adjustment is the effect the book is after. It is short enough that you can hold the whole shape in your head, which is part of why it works.
The publisher copy leans on two press lines, describing him as a practitioner of hilarious honesty and noting simply that he is funny, invariably. Both are true and both undersell this particular book. There is more grief in it than either sentence prepares you for.
The Narration
The listing leaves the narrator field empty, which is a genuine gap on a book of this kind, so let me tell you what to listen for rather than assert something the page does not confirm. Sedaris’s prose is built for the ear before it is built for the page. Timing is doing most of the comic work, the sentences are calibrated around pauses rather than punchlines, and the flattest possible delivery is almost always the correct one. This is material that a conventionally expressive narrator can genuinely damage by acting it.
One of the reviewers points, usefully, at the surrounding evidence. He mentions a series of monologues Sedaris recorded for BBC radio and recommends seeking them out. That is the tradition this writing comes from, and it matters here: prose built to be spoken to a room behaves differently from prose built for the page. If you have heard him read on the radio, you already know the cadence this material was written in, and how much of the effect depends on refusing to signal a joke coming.
The pandemic essays and the paternal essays make a further demand. They require a reader willing to let the tonal shift happen without announcing it, moving from a laugh to something considerably colder inside a paragraph and not slowing down to mark the transition. Handled well it is devastating. Handled cautiously it becomes two different books awkwardly glued together, and the collection loses the quality that makes it worth your time.
What Readers Say
The response is warm, and the three reviews shown here split along a line I found genuinely instructive. One five-star reviewer recommends this as an entry point for anyone unfamiliar with Sedaris, calling him “the master of the brilliantly observed rambling tale” and praising the engaging, funny and often uplifting quality of the stories. Another, at five stars, says that he turns life’s ups and downs into memorable prose and that “We finish the book with a smile on our face”. Those are readers who came for the humour and got it.
The most useful review in the pool is the four-star one, and it says something quite different. This reader, a long-standing admirer who normally reads Sedaris for the comedy, reports that “the essays that stand out for me this time are those that deal with the death of his father and his somewhat complicated grief”. They single out the title essay as particularly poignant “given how it deals with the topic of last words”. That is a reader adjusting their expectations mid-collection, and it matches my own experience of the book closely.
The four-star rating, then, is not a complaint about quality. It reads as a note that this is a slightly different Sedaris from the one they picked up expecting, which is exactly the information a prospective listener needs. Nobody in the shown reviews suggests the collection is weak. The disagreement is about what kind of book it turns out to be.
Who Should Listen?
Readers already inside the Sedaris habit should take this one, with the caveat that it is less reliably funny than the pitch suggests and considerably more exposed. If you value him as an essayist rather than as a humorist, this may well become your favourite. Newcomers are better served than you might expect too, since one experienced reviewer specifically nominates it as a good starting point, and this is a manageable first commitment.
Grief is handled without consolation here, so if you are close to a bereavement of your own, let this one wait rather than avoid it altogether. Anyone wanting pure comic relief from lockdown will find the middle stretch closer to a record of that period than an escape from it. Anyone who has never got on with the essay form, where the pleasure lies in the sentence and the digression rather than in what happens next, will not be converted by this one.
