Don't Get Too Comfortable

The full title, Don't Get Too Comfortable: The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems, might lead you to believe this book might be a little too much. Not so. Clever, but not pretentious. Funny, but not cruel. Angry, but never strident. Somehow I missed Rakoff's earlier Fraud, but I'm adding it to my wish list now.

I was a big fan of this. I'd read the first essay in this collection–about his efforts to become an American citizen–in one of the Best American Essays and loved it. A lot of people write essays about This Modern Life and how quirky Americans are, but Rakoff somehow points out our quirks, calls attention to the fact that not only are they funny but also selfish and reckless, and does so hilariously. Dig it like dirt.

With Rakoff's passing I thought it appropriate to revisit this Canadian expat. I've given him short shrift in the past, he the second fiddle to the other nebbish, homosexual New Yorker named David. (Turns out it was that same David Sedaris that helped propel Rakoff's early career.)

Don't Get Too Comfortable is a collection of essays. It becomes clear that you can take the Canadian out of Canada but you can't get the Canada out of the Canadian. Rakoff seems to be the outsider looking in. Starting with his experience becoming an American he mines his fascination with the first world, outsized experience of the “typical American” ...or at least the American other countries might sniff at. (As a Canadian I should apologize for any slight that might be implied by that statement)

Maybe it's all shooting fish but Rakoff can still skewer with scathing precision.

“How better then to show a nobility of spirit than by broadcasting your capacity to discern the gustatory equivalent of a hummingbird's cough as it beats its wings near a blossom that grows by a glassy pond on the other side of a distant mountain? No surer proof that one is meant for better things than an easily bruised delicacy. Such a perfectly tuned instrument can quickly suss out the cheap and nasty. So, the bitterness at the back of the throat; the polite refusal of the glass of whiskey marred by those (shudder) domestic ice cubes; the physical and psychic insult that are sheets of anything short of isotopic density. What is the thread count, Kenneth? We have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas.”