Customer Reviews

Fraud: Essays

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Other reviewers have invariably used David Sedaris as the benchmark to measure David Rakoff against. The two do, after all, share some qualities--they're both radio contributors to This American Life, they're both gay, and, most importantly, they're both wonderful writers.

The comparison between the two Davids is appropriate, but only to a point. Sedaris's genius stems from his ability to make you see things from his warped perspective. Rakoff isn't quite as eccentric, but he is just as observant, and his writing is always elegant, interesting, and often plain funny. My favorite parts of Fraud were a handful of travel essays--accounts of trips to Tokyo, Northern Scotland, and to New England for a Christmas Day mountain climb. I thought some of Rakoff's essays were better than others, but in the abridged audio version I listened to, there's not a weak one in the bunch.

For most people, I suspect, Rakoff is easier to identify with. When he tells you in a touching essay about his experiences as a 22-year-old cancer patient, you feel like you understand, even if you've never gone through such tragedy yourself. (As big a David Sedaris fan as I am, I simply can't relate to, say, his adolescent desire to sing commercial jingles in the style of Billie Holiday.)

So give Rakoff his due. Fraud is an interesting, literate collection of essays that deserves to be recognized in its own right--and not just as a book by that other gay This American Life contributor named David.

Reading the reviews here, it looks as though the people who enjoyed this book have moved on to other things in their lives while the naysayers are having the last word. This is unfortunate, because David Rakoff is a very funny and perceptive writer. Although not every one of these essays is a polished jewel, the best of them - his encounter with Steven Seagal, his appearance on a popular daytime soap opera, his report on a Tom Brown survival training course --- stand up as quality humor even after repeated readings.

Most of the negative reactions come from a common disappointment that Rakoff does not write precisely like David Sedaris or Augusten Burroughs. What can you say to that? Either expand your range or wait for those writers' next books to be published.

Other criticisms seem to gather around Rakoff's tendency to use multisyllabic words, when a "simpler" vocabulary would have sufficed. While there are many comic writers today who write using everyday vernacular, what is unique about Rakoff is that he reaches for something more profound than a simple comic setup. Getting there, he does risk coming off as pretentious, and he does indeed use big words, which for some people will call for a dictionary.

In his first collection, Rakoff provides us with good anecdotes, shows solid comic timing, and yes, his big words pass the dictionary test.

Oh my gosh! I love this man.

I've read many humorists after falling in love with David Sedaris's "Barrel Fever". I've clicked on "If you like David Sedaris you'll love...." links all over the web. Strangely enough someone handed me a copy of "Fraud" at the pool one day and never made the famous comparison. Of course I figured it out soon enough but was overtaken with the difference. Rakoff's essays have much more meat to them. I felt as if I'd learned more at the end of each one, much like a good short story. Alice Munro perhaps...crazy comparison but something about his endings reminded me of her. Oh Canada!

I do agree on one thing however. Whether Rakoff is a linguistic genius or a Dictionary-Thumper, I could have done without the impressive display of vocabulary. None of us know people who use these words and if we did we certainly wouldn't invite them over for dinner. Still, it's a small price to pay.

Never heard of David Rakoff until I saw him on a recent talk show, and as I'm always in the mood for observations on society, etc. by a smart gay man, spent a warm afternoon or two with this often amusing book of essays. Subjects include a trip to Iceland, a wildnerness survival/tracking course, a visit to a New Age mecca, and climbing a mountain somewhere in New England. Mr. Rakoff isn't as funny as David Sedaris, there is a strong undertone of melancholy, and he is self-deprecating in the extreme. He actually admits - twice! - to wearing black plastic shoes, which information astonishes me. I plan to look up his previous work on the internet, and look forward to any future books with great anticipation.

David Rakoff sees the sham in nearly everything. The success of his book, however, is no fraud. The writing (deft, limber, ambitious)! The settings (Scotland to Iceland; ice cream parlors and cancer wards)! The charming self-pity that makes the reader love him! I'm sure there will be comparisons to David Sedaris, but the two writers have different goals. Rakoff shows us that, despite all the lies, a true (if achingly lonely) heart keeps on thudding.

The preface quote says it all: "You're maudlin and full of self-pity. You're magnificent." This is a collection of about 15 short essays and stories by David Rakoff, known for his essays and interviews in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and from his appearances on WBZ-Public Radio's This American Life with Ira Glass. A New York City-based young, gay, Jewish man who is actually Canadian (yes, he is a fraud like Peter Jennings and Monty Hall), with a degree in Japanese studies, his stories place him in a range of activities. Each story is tender, fresh and funny. My favorites included stories on the time he attended a survival school in which he learns to skin animals and never again to drive down the highway and look at roadkill the same way; an essay on the day he climbed Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire on a cold stormy Christmas in a possible test of ennobling manhood; his recounting of a Toronto adolescence where he and other children of professionals sang the Internationale, commited themselves to Zionist Socialism, and did an instructional stint in a kibbutz chicken coop; and the time he played a form of Jewy McHebrew on a soap opera, and imagined himself in a recurring role. Some of the other stories include the time he sat in Manhattan clothing store's Christmas window as a Christmas Sigmund Freud (he tells people why their wishful desires are unhealthy for them, or wished for in error); a story in which he attends a weekend Buddhist retreat, in which the Aikido-fighting, aubergine and saffron wearing, actor, Steven Seagal is the guest teacher of Tibetan Buddhism; and a story that should be read by every college English major, namely an essay of despair that recounts the time he worked as a low-payed entry level editorial assistant (secretary) at a NYC publisher.

Christmas Freud, in this collection, is about as pitch-perfect a humor essay as you'll ever find and close to being worth the price of the book alone. Thankfully, though, Rakoff's other pieces are all worth reading, if sometimes a little too "easy." After all, what sport is there in sending a witty NYorker into small-town anywhere to poke fun at its inhabitants? Fish-out-of-water is fish-out-of-water no matter if it's Crocodile Dundee in LA or David Rakoff in Inverness.

He comes closest to matching Christmas Freud in a dissection of a small role on a soap opera, his jottings on Austrian graduates teaching in an inner-city school, a weird little piece on life in a kibbutz, and an elusive piece on his "battle" with Hodgkins.

I promised myself that I wouldn't compare this book to the writings of David Sedaris, however, after numerous references to "My friend David", or "The play written by my friend David and his sister Amy", and even a front cover quote from David Sedaris himself, I found it impossible not to make comparisons.

David Rakoff starts out very strongly with "In New England, Everyone Calls You Dave", but seems to stall with many of his other stories, and seems to exude less wit, and more whine. While Sedaris points out other people's shortcomings in a humorous and almost omniscient manner, Rakoff wears thin rather quickly, and comes off more bitter and self-righteous than humorous. Rakoff is obviously very well read, but his love of the thesaurus tends to make his writing seem pretentious, even when he's trying to be an Average Joe. His observations just don't have the immediacy of someone seeing someone/something, but rather seem to be boiled down and carefully picked through like an overcooked stew. This takes most of the humor out of the stories, and what you're left with is rather flavorless.

There are several funny stories later in the book, but it takes such an effort to get to them that it may not be worth it. Overall, an okay effort, but I'd rather stick with Sedaris.

Your average New Yorker may find this to be one of the funniest books ever written, seriously. Unfortunately no-one bothered to translate this book for the rest of the country. In this book, it is typical that David spends two paragraphs building up a scene, or a moment within the scene, to end it with a reference to some New Yorker, past or present, as some sort of punchline. Rakoff never bothers to explain, even for an instant, who in the hell these people are. For example, when someone is asked to move a tent pole a few inches because it was in the way of a lane that had been planned, Rakoff starts in like a professional comedian-- finding the humor in the monotonous. He starts in dryly expanding the idea of planning a path where people will walk into someone's vision of a vast tent city and ends it by comparing the person who planned the lane with Robert Moses. Quite funny if you know that Robert Moses was NY City's most powerful City Planner, and some of his history. Moses is probably the most mainstream of Rakoff's name-dropping punchlines. Others, I assume, revolve around NY's art, lit., and political scenes. Most of this could have been solved by simply adding titles to the names, like saying "former NY City City Planner Robert Moses" rather than just "Robert Moses."

If you're a New Yorker, or well versed in New York culture, this book was literally written for you. For the rest of us, the book contains a lot of non-namedropping moments of sheer brilliance, but you have to be willing to drudge through all those worthless names to see it.

Bear with me while I start a review of David Rakoff by talking about David Sedaris. It's relevant. When I first read David Sedaris, I got the impression that I had inadvertently picked up a toned-down true-life confessional instead of a humour book; having been raised on Dave Barry, it was hard for me to accept that this sort of low-key subtlety could be funny, and I confess I was disappointed. After a little time had passed and I had got the idea that Sedaris wasn't going to make me topple from my chair with laughter, I read a few of his essays again with an eye for the quieter humour, and I liked it much more.

Now to David Rakoff. The connexion is not a tenuous one; there's a somewhat ambiguous quote from David Sedaris on the front cover, and we're clearly meant to buy the writings of one because we enjoy the work of the other. (The quote says David Rakoff ``passes himself off'' as a funnyman, which I think is meant to be in keeping with the theme but comes off as a bit of a backhanded compliment.) Indeed, as many of the other reviewers here seem to have pointed out already, there's also a strong stylistic similarity, and it takes a similar eye for low-key rather than guffawing knee-slapping humour to appreciate it. The only problem is that Rakoff seems to want to drive home to us that, underneath this veneer of unmoved cynicism, of hard-edged New Yorkerism, he's really a guy who Gets It. I was reminded inevitably of a sitcom in which the characters might bicker, but, in the end, they really love one another. Rakoff can be funny, even hilarious, in places, and he's a marvellously intelligent writer, but, if you want really to enjoy him, skim off the last paragraph of each entry when he shifts tones to dewy-eyed wonder to share with you The Lesson He's Learned (nature isn't that bad; credulous Loch Ness-types aren't that bad; martial arts mysticism isn't that bad).

The only time this wasn't objectionable was in the last essay, in reading which I really felt like I had shared in a slice of his life. Here, the lesson is not I Shouldn't be Intolerant but rather -- well, read it. It's a genuine lesson learned, not a pleased reflexion on how open-minded he really is, in the end; and it's welcome, and almost heartbreaking, this thoroughly genuine moment in a book so entrenchedly about sarcasm and fraud.