'The Land and Its People' review: Is David Sedaris too comfy?Comfort dulls the edge for David Sedaris in 'The Land and Its People'

David Sedaris has long made us chuckle at life’s inequities. He’s back again with another essay collection, The Land and Its People. But time and success have skewed Sedaris’s sense of humor.

No longer does Sedaris write of the trials and tribulations of a struggling artist, like when he worked as an elf at Macy’s long before the gig economy was a thing. Now, he divides his time with his husband between their Upper East Side apartment, West Sussex farmhouse, and a home for family gatherings (“The Sea Section”) on Emerald Isle, North Carolina.

This isn’t to begrudge Sedaris’s well-earned success. He’s plucked the needle from the haystack, leveraging observational humor into a decades-long career, unafraid to tackle subjects like mortality with a kind of literary shrug that induces a grin and a quick page flip.

Something smells fishy

I started to feel a disconnect with Sedaris’s last collection, 2022’s Happy-Go-Lucky, in which he reflected on participating in a Black Lives Matter march by comparing the crowd’s chants to a fishmonger shouting “Fresh-caught haddock.” First Amendment aside, it just felt off.

Similarly, The Land and Its People peppers similarly awkward passages, such as the author’s frustration when, after donating to Operation Smile, he receives “some horrific new pamphlet with a human jack-o’-lantern on its cover and a caption reading, ‘Pedro Needs Your Help.’ “

Or his nonchalant reflection on being physically abused as a child. “I don’t feel like it traumatized me to be knocked around a little,” Sedaris writes. “Blood was rarely drawn.”

Some might consider it persnickety to cherry-pick a phrase here or there, when Sedaris’s writing feels otherwise accessible—the perfect Fire Island or Provincetown beach read, where the author’s name emblazoned across the book jacket might elicit a second glance from a bikini-clad sunbather. Fair enough.

In the book’s final essay, “Cash and Carry,” Sedaris helps a stranger in his neighborhood carry a cabinet down the street. This prompts a stream-of-consciousness examination of his wealth, material and otherwise, noting Elon Musk’s trajectory to become the world’s first trillionaire and how long it would take the author to count his own money.

“At what point, if any, would I decide that I had enough?” Sedaris asks. At the book’s end, I found myself asking the same question.