Sedaris's debut collection mixes caustic personal essays with dark short fiction, introducing his signature voice: self-lacerating, absurdly specific, socially horrified, and funnier than it has any right to be. The fiction pieces in particular show a writer willing to go somewhere genuinely uncomfortable.
Sedaris's first book, and you can feel him still figuring out what he's going to do for the next thirty years. Half of Barrel Fever is short fiction — some of it pretty weird, some of it very early-nineties-New-York — and the other half is the personal essays that would turn him into, eventually, one of the most reliable comedy acts in American letters. The most famous piece, SantaLand Diaries, is in here. Twenty-three pages of a guy working as an elf at Macy's during Christmas. If you've only heard it on the radio, read it on the page. The sentences hit different when you can see the construction.
The voice in these early essays is rawer than the later stuff. It hasn't been sanded yet. He's writing about his family, which is the vein he'll keep mining successfully for decades, but he hasn't quite learned when to pull back, so some of the Barrel Fever pieces cut closer than he probably meant them to. Which, honestly, makes them better. The family in the later books — especially Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim — is softer. Here, everybody's still a little bit dangerous.
This is not a book I'd tell you to read on the river, particularly. It's not a desert book. It's not a landscape book. There's no geology. But if you run trips with the kind of people who can hold silence but also need, on day six, to be reminded that human beings are ridiculous, this is the book that does it. Sedaris is the best living writer in English on the texture of social embarrassment. Which has a use in a crew, on a long afternoon, when somebody needs reminding that other people's families are also a catastrophe.
The short fiction in the first half is uneven and you can skip around. The essays at the back are where the book earns its spot on the shelf. SantaLand Diaries, Diary of a Smoker, Giantess — these are essays where you can see Sedaris learning, one piece at a time, that his family is a world and he gets to be the cartographer. The voice that maps that world is already nearly complete. He just didn't know yet how nicely it was going to age.
Read it after a long day, alone in a tent, with a headlamp. Laugh loud enough that whoever's camped next to you asks what was funny. Refuse to explain. That's how this book is meant to travel.
