In new, more sentimental essays, Sedaris talks pretty

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

By David Sedaris

Little, Brown, 257 pp., $24.95

There is a moment in the 1998 John Waters movie "Pecker" where the title character, an avid shutterbug with an eye for capturing his family and friends in seemingly everyday situations -- such as shoplifting and receiving messages through a puppet of the Virgin Mary -- suddenly finds himself without subjects to photograph.

Pecker's loved ones, having grown weary of their newfound celebrity status after their photographs cause a minor sensation in New York's art world, stop acting like themselves around Pecker's camera. You can't help getting the feeling that David Sedaris's family is having the same reaction to winding up as regular characters in his hugely popular books.

In his latest collection, "Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim," Sedaris writes that when family members now tell him stories, they are generally preceded by the line "You have to swear you'll never repeat this."

"I always promise, but it's generally understood that my word means nothing," he writes.

Even if Sedaris stayed true to his word and avoided the subject of his family entirely, his flippant essays would still be a thrill to read. Here's a man who could write about changing kitty litter and still slay with his wonderfully self-deprecating wit and pixieish perspective. But instead of hiding from the discomfort of the situation with his family, Sedaris uses their barricade as an opportunity to go deeper than stories about his sister's feuding parrots, Henry and Jos. He examines his relationships with his siblings in a surprisingly touching, candid, and humorous way.

Sedaris's idiotropic view of the present is just a small part of "Dress Your Family." Childhood and adolescence, periods that are particularly painful and memorable for "boys who spend their weekends making banana nut muffins," set the stage for the book. Sedaris begins by confessing that he played Peeping Tom to a family that lived in his childhood neighborhood, a family that (gasp!) didn't own a television set.

"What must it be like to be so ignorant and alone?" young Sedaris wonders after spying on the family and realizing that no television means these unfortunate souls are forced to actually talk to one another through dinner. Whatever pity he feels for these television-less jackanapes is quickly squashed when he's forced to share his Halloween candy with them.

The first essay is appropriately titled "Us and Them," and through much of "Dress Your Family," it's Sedaris against the world as he confronts all manner of pusillanimous neighbors, classmates, and employers. There are plenty of the laugh-out-loud moments, but unlike his previous tomes, "Dress Your Family" is sprinkled with sweetness and sentimentality between the briery passages. There's even a short, flickering instance in "The Ship Shape" where Sedaris looks back with rose-colored, rhinestone-studded cat glasses and sees that in between his mother locking him and his sisters out in the snow, and his getting hit in the jaw with a rock from the most popular kid in school, there were a few minutes of normalcy.

"When older, even the crankiest of us would accept them as proof that we were once a happy family," Sedaris writes about a few fleeting minutes when the family believed they were purchasing a beach house.

The halcyon mist evaporates in later chapters as Sedaris endures an unusual profession in order to afford "a masculine cherry red" vest from J. C. Penney and must think on his feet to avoid getting naked in front of classmates. But the book provides its most squirm-worthy laughs when Sedaris must find a way to relate to family members who pull frozen turkeys from the trash and consume antibiotics prescribed for the Great Dane. And for all the constant self-deprecation, this is where Sedaris's character truly shines. He doesn't run when sister Tiffany tells him "I didn't really want you here in the first place" during his visit. And he still attempts to clean her apartment, even when she calls him "Fairy Poppins."

You know that Sedaris is sticking around, despite the cold shoulder, because he needs material for his books. At least that's the excuse he can use. But beyond the opportunity to poke fun at his brother crafting mutton-chop sideburns from slabs of bacon for a Christmas photo, Sedaris is still able to convey honest affection for his family. And that makes his humor all the more real.

Christopher Muther is a member of the Globe staff. He can be reached at muther@globe.com.