not for the clothes-minded

In a recent New Yorker review, Anthony Lane describes the movie Crash as "bare-assed philosophy." NPR commentator David Sedaris' new book of humorous essays, Naked, delivers glimpses of, so to speak, a philosophy of the bare ass.

The author seems to have dropped his pants and not cared: each piece is full of painful, embarrassing details presented as casual confessional. But Sedaris' earnest delivery never conceals his subversive, impish wit, a thing upon which the world's pretentions and neuroses are skewered.

Curiously, these pretentions and neuroses often belong to the author, who self-deprecates his way into a condition of lovability. In the hilarious but uncomfortable "a plague of tics," Sedaris recounts a childhood spent compulsively licking lightbulbs and sticking butter knives into outlets.

In the half-escapist "chipped beef" a young, impoverished David imagines a wealth that can satisfy his lust for snobbery: "We give anonymously because the sackfuls of thank-you letters break our hearts with their clumsy handwriting and hopelessly phonetic spelling." Later, in "the incomplete quad," he recalls with nostalgia his shattered dreams of Harvard: "I wasn't sure what a quad was, but I knew that I wanted one desperately. My college friends would own horses and monogrammed shoehorns."

In the body of the book, where he often fixes on other people, he serves up deadly, sweeping categorizations. According to Sedaris, the people who most want to be in acting are always "Jews, homosexuals, and portly girls, whose faces were caked with acne medication." Of people who live in trailers, he remarks that, in general, they "peed in the sink and used metal buckets to barbeque tough purple steaks marked 'reduced for final sale.'" His sense of humor is alert and p.c.-heedless.

Naked is largely a record of the author's success and failure at the many stints of his life. He writes of his experience as an intern at an insane asylum, as a dishwasher, a fruitpicker, a thief and a jade-salesperson. Many of these adventures occur during his travels, where it is clear Sedaris has an ear not only for how Americans talk but, more importantly, for how they cuss.

Recalling a nightmare bus ride from North Carolina to Oregon, he captures the discreet charm of a particular single mother: "I got a good mind to call him Cecil Fucking Fuckwad, after his daddy." Later, outside of Portland, he hears of the tender courtship of a man of faith: "Oh, she wasn't my wife at the time, just another cute nurse with a great set of tits and an ass a man could get lost in. Jesus brought us together. Then he told us to get married and hightail it the fuck out of Alaska."

Sedaris reserves his highest, most poetic register of speech, the one in which wheelchairs are called "electric chariots," to downplay the danger he faced, on and off the road, from a larcenous, knife-wielding stud to a dildo collector.

These stories are all either true or based on fact, but when Sedaris writes about his own family he seems not to resist satire by caricature. No one could be as loopy as his Greek grandmother Ya-Ya. Surely no one's father was ever ruled by such morbid paranoia. Do children of eight and 10 really get hold of a smutty book and then walk around chirping "tight willin' gasshole"?

Yes, they do. Sedaris' candor is marvelous because it is unmediated. It earns our trust because it turns away from no dark corner as it explores the many ways in which people misbehave.

Neither Dave Barry nor Erma Bombeck could get away with admitting that "someone in our family had taken to wiping his or her ass on the bath towels." Few others besides Sedaris dare to describe the sexual fantasies of quadriplegic felons. Even his more mainstream interest in describing his first gay experience is complicated by a brave look at masturbation: "Our love had the power to move beds."

Often, Naked comes off simply as lowbrow comedy in highbrow style, though the book's finest moment, in "ashes," is a haunting and serious meditation on his mother's death from cancer. But when we arrive at the final essay, the title piece, we realize Sedaris wants to do more than be funny. He spends time in a nudist colony not only to poke fun at people but also to be able to present the world in all its unadorned vericose-veininess, its rippling obesity and sexual deformity: not a bright or pleasant vision, but a deftly-delivered one that rings true and invites people to examine their own lives.

This book is excellent reading for anyone who rejects Wallace Stevens' distaste for "the dreadful sundry of this world." And for anyone with a thick skin and an acute sense of irony. There are lots of laughs-out-loud here. But don't forget to meet the author on his own terms. As the colony rules say, "YOU MUST BE NUDE."

An Interview with David Sedaris

Five minutes with David Sedaris are enough to confirm that most everything in Naked is true. He reenacts his old nervous tics one by one, rolling his eyes incredibly far back in his head, and stipulating that the pen resting on my pad be exactly parallel to the edge of the table. He admits that if he had gotten into Harvard, he'd have been "the biggest fucking snob you ever saw."

Sedaris, a small, nervous man of forty, can afford to look back. With a three-book contract with Little, Brown and a month-long publicity tour underway, plus a steady income from NPR, he says he won't write again "until I'm completely broke."

He is also not worried about getting pigeonholed for his style and outlook. "'Dark' is a good word, it seems to me." But he modestly disavows the book jacket's comparison of him to Mark Twain and Nathanael West, saying, "these are nice people, but they needed to say something."

His sense of humor is always on the prowl, even in person, but he is an equal-opportunity lambaster. He moves from a hilarious sendup of an anonymous schmooze at the New Yorker Christmas party ("David daaahling you must meet Calvin!") to a gleefully cruel assault on an innocent Au Bon Pain patron. Nor does he spare himself.

Sedaris is an odd egg. He wrote all of Naked last year, mostly at night, hunting-and-pecking on a typewriter, which is the main reason he "can't stand the painful shit, like editing." Though smiling wide when amusing someone, Sedaris claims he only laughs at his material "one time, and that's when I'm writing."

He is sensitive about the media's fixation on his former career as a house cleaner, which he describes as "my job and their hook." In a Rod Roddy voice he relates one uncomfortable appearance on a talk show whose host cackled, "Our guest is an author and...get this...he cleans houses!"

Sedaris speaks of all the figures in Naked with great enthusiasm, particularly his family members. Describing the genesis of the book, he claims that "for my mom, it was a gesture of affection. These are stories the way she told stories." His childhood in rural North Carolina apparently offered him plenty of time to hear about and observe people being crazy and stupid.

His commentary career began when a bigwig heard him in New York reading from his diaries like a standup comedian. Though he is frequently on "Morning Edition," he never listens to his own voice and is sure that no reader suffers from its absence. He plans to continue in radio.

When asked about his excursion to the nudist colony this past July, Sedaris lowers his voice and gets serious. "The reason I went was contrary to everything else in the book," he says, meaning that he actively sought a satire-ripe situation, rather than noticing the absurdity of daily life. He adds that there is some possibility of a lawsuit, since no one there knew he was a writer and a humorist.

Sedaris' publisher begged him to exclude "naked" from the book. If that had happened, the volume would have been called "something for everyone," because, he says, "there's something to offend everyone." The people who can tolerate his offensiveness are laughing too hard to object, anyway.