Fraud - Hardcover

Rakoff, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 038550084X ISBN 13: 9780385500845

Publisher: Doubleday, 2001

Synopsis

You've heard him on This American Life! Now read his book!

Wherever he is, David Rakoff is a fish out of water. Whether impersonating Sigmund Freud in a department store window during the holidays, climbing an icy mountain in cheap loafers, playing an evil modeling agent on a daytime soap opera, or learning primitive survival skills in the wilds of New Jersey, Rakoff doesn't belong. Nor does he try to. Still, he continually finds himself off in the far-flung hinterlands of our culture, notebook or microphone in hand, hoping to conjure that dyed-in-the-wool New York condescension.

And Rakoff tries to be nasty; heaven knows nothing succeeds like the cheap sneer, but he can't quite help noticing that these are actual human beings he's writing about. In his attempts not to pull any punches, the most damaging blows, more often than not, land squarely on his own jaw--hilariously satirizing the writer, not the subject.

And therein lies David Rakoff's genius and his burgeoning appeal. The wry and the heartfelt join in his prose to resurrect that most neglected of literary virtues: wit.

Read the blurbs again on the back. They signal the arrival of a brilliant new American essayist. (Okay, Canadian.)

About this title

Review

Let's get this out of the way: David Rakoff is not David Sedaris. When you hear him being incredibly smart and funny on This American Life, you invariably think, "Oh, it's David Sedaris." But if you listen closely, you can tell the difference. Rakoff, while no less witty or nasal, is a little more disappointed. In his first collection--a series of pieces for public radio and for various magazines--he positively revels in his world-weariness. Whether he's investigating the Loch Ness monster, attending a comedy festival in Aspen, Colorado, visiting a New Age retreat hosted by Steven Seagal, or just, you know, playing Freud in a department-store window at Christmastime, Rakoff tends to get comically depleted. Watching the comic Dan Castellaneta, for example, he writes, "It's a bad sign when I start counting the unused props on stage. Only two wigs, one stool, an easel, and a dropcloth to go. I begin to pray to an unfeeling God to please make Castellaneta multitask." In a piece where he attempts to climb a mountain (well... a very short hill), Rakoff immediately nips any Sierra Club fantasies in the bud: "I do not go outdoors. Not more than I have to. As far as I'm concerned, the whole point of living in New York City is indoors. You want greenery? Order the spinach." But in the end, what makes him such a terrific writer is that he's not only onto everyone else, he's onto himself. No wonder his visit to a kibbutz becomes the occasion for some supremely self-conscious amusement: "I know I sound like the Central Casting New Yorker I've turned myself into with single-minded determination when I say this, but the main problem with working in the fields is that the sun is just always shining." --Claire Dederer

From the Back Cover

Advance Praise for Fraud:
"With Fraud, David Rakoff manages to successfully pass himself off as the wittiest and most perceptive man in the world."
--David Sedaris, author of Me Talk Pretty One Day

"David Rakoff's hilarious, bittersweet stories are epic struggles between smoky bars and the great outdoors, management and labor, Santa Claus and Sigmund Freud, New York versus everywhere else, and, not least, neighbor-to-the-North against South. Rakoff is such an American original it turns out he's Canadian. Vive the brain drain!"
--Sarah Vowell, author of Take the Cannoli

"It's hard to come up with a pithy remark for the back of this book, knowing that the author could--in half the time and a third of the words--come up with something funnier, more piercing, and more deeply revealing. Like a whore with a heart of gold, David Rakoff says all the nasty things we want to hear--and then reveals, after we've paid our money--that actually--it's all about love."
--Ira Glass, This American Life

"David Rakoff is a comic saint: He travels to unspeakable lands, chats with lunatics, and we reap the rewards. He is a sublime tour guide, an ideal mix of the crabby and the debonair."
--Paul Rudnick, author of Jeffrey and the screenplay for the movie In and Out.

"The love child of S. J. Perelman and Elaine May, the by-blow of Benchley and Parker--without his bay window and her bad habits--David Rakoff is everything the Algonquin Table should have been."
--Amy Bloom, author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

"Rakoff likes to paint himself as a sneering, city-slick New Yorker, urbane to a fault, an outsider anywhere unpaved. But then, in the woods, on a mountaintop, looking for 'Hidden People' outside Reykjavik, he reveals himself, despite his searing and hilarious observations, his 'effete lexicon,' to be a completely unrelenting romantic, always looking, and often finding, experiences that edify and cleanse, people who are true and good. And while he doesn't seem to count himself among their ranks, it takes one to know one."
--Dave Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 038550084X
• ISBN 13: 9780385500845
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240