Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

I am a person who feels guilty for crimes I have not committed, or have not committed in years. The police search the train station for a serial rapist and I cover my face with a newspaper, wondering if maybe I did it in my sleep.... I seem to have developed a remarkable perspiration problem. My conscience is cross-wired with my sweat glands, but there's a short in the system and I break out over things I didn't do, which only makes me look more suspect.

I'm about two years behind the bandwagon on this book. Actually, it might be more like three or four years, but regardless, at some point, David Sedaris was the hot new thing in the book world.

I guess I can see why. I enjoyed all of his stories, and while some of them were a little too neatly tied up and others sort of dropped off in the middle of nowhere, there's no doubt this man can write.

There's a hysterical anecdote in this collection about a tourist in Normandy stopping for directions and catching Mr. Sedaris drowning an injured mouse in a bucket. This in itself is not terribly funny, especially since the story is in the same vein as the "I-did-nothing-why-do-I-feel-guilty" pedophilia story. However, I cracked up at the line, "Oh...I see you have a little swimming mouse." I don't know why, but it probably has something to do with the image of an accented man in track pants and black loafers leaning over a bucket containing a swimming mouse and trying to make conversation.

All of these stories -- essays? -- are autobiographical, so though there is a lot of laughing at himself and his family, Mr. Sedaris's book also has a good dose of bitterness. There's the typical teen agnst in some of the earlier stories, as well as kind of a literary tirade against people who use the words "homosexual" and "pedophile" interchangeably in one of the later ones. Still, it's hard not to like a writer who describes the voice of reason as sounding like Bea Arthur.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her...for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through it all.

I really want to like Virginia Woolf. Honest, I do. I think she's a great writer, a brilliant thinker and critic and essayist, and that she does exactly what she sets out to do when she begins to write, with the exception of those disappointments all authors have with their finished products.

Still, I just don't like To the Lighthouse. I know that my enjoying the novel is more or less irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, as I'm just a piddly undergraduate living 100 years and 4,000 miles away from where Woolf was writing from.

The ideas are brilliant, and really more of what's in Mrs. Dalloway -- mourning the passage of time and lamenting the burden of life (can you tell Woolf was a teensy bit suicidal?). I suspect James will never get to visit the lighthouse, and that Mr. Ramsey will continue quoting "The Charge of the Light Brigade" without ever getting past that one line.

Is it okay to say the book is amazing without having actually enjoyed it? When I count down the criteria I consider necessary for a work to be "good," To the Lighthouse fits them perfectly. Strong theme? Check. Good metaphors? Check (though sometimes they are a bit obvious). Plot? Check -- kind of, but that's not a major one, anyway. Solid, fluent and fluid sentence structure? Check.

I have a feeling this novel(la?) is one of those books that will be taught widely in twenty years or so, even though I think it's relatively obscure right now. It has all the earmarks of a great work, but as of yet none of the attention of Mrs. Dalloway or A Room of One's Own. Still, for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, I just...couldn't like it.