Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary By David Sedaris

Rating: 8/10 Dropps

David Sedaris’ latest work, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary, is an inventive, playful, and somewhat brazen attempt at the modern fable. The collection features sixteen stories with characters such as: migrating warblers, a vigilant rabbit, and a judicious brown chicken. The title of the collection, in particular, stems from a story about a squirrel who loves chipmunks and jazz. Taken in tandem with illustrations by Ian Falconer – the author and illustrator of the bestselling Olivia series – Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk uses a satirical lens to view social life by projecting it onto animals. The stories are rich, hilarious, and apologetically brutal. If you can call anthropomorphic glimpses into the pitfalls of contemporary social interaction moralistic, then Sedaris is your Aesop.

To be accurate, humans aren’t explicitly mentioned in the book, and if they are they’re usually the center of a tongue and cheek joke told from a bestial perspective. For instance, in “The Faithful Setter,” Sedaris critiques pet owners who identify with pets a smidgen too literally (getting on all fours and barking, I’ll not mention any names here).  And there are interesting and ridiculous instances in which Sedaris enhances the prose using the possibilities presented by animal traits alone. It would be inaccurate to state that these stories perform solely as fun-house mirrors for the average middle class citizen.

However, it would equally as preposterous to say that these stories are anything less than the projections of our interactions with our own species. They are about the dilemmas we face under the human condition, whether that itchy standard of righteousness can be faithfully marked (according to an unfortunate brown chicken, it’s not that cut and dry).

Take the story about the setter. The limits of being faithful in personal relationships, in the face of grotesque apathy, are weighed against  examples which indulge a stolid and compromising lifestyle. This is done through the eyes of a setter, no less.

It becomes apparent that by employing cartoonish illustrations and a literary form more common to younger readers, Sedaris gets away with something that is, quite frankly, brilliant. He is brutally honest while remaining as far removed as humanly possible (pun intended).  In so doing, Sedaris hits the reader over the head with the sharpness of his prose and subjects  while keeping the moral understated through the absurdity of the overall presentation. The only disappointment which can be found from this collection is that the satire is not as lighthearted or as (disputably) humorous as Sedaris’s previous works. It focuses on matters that hit close to home, and that may be hard to swallow for some readers.

The stories, such as “The Sick Rat and the Healthy Rat,” jab at the reader’s conscience. In this story, two lab rats discuss whether contracting disease is really a matter of science or state of mind. The healthy rat contests that she never gets sick due to a karmic dogma/lifestyle (which includes constantly staying social and reciting limericks). The sick rat, which is dying of pancreatic cancer induced by human study, doesn’t share this opinion. The resolution of the story I’ll leave to allusions: the rats share the same landlord. However, a simple summary doesn’t fully justify this work. To truly get a sense of the kind of brutal irony invoked by Sedaris and Falconer,  one has to pick up the book and start reading. This is conceivably the easiest step of the whole ordeal. The more troublesome business arises out of attempts to put the book down.

Dropped by Melika Millie Hadziomerovic