Book Review: Don't Get Too Comfortable

David Rakoff Creatively Rants About First World Problems

This is a review of Don’t Get Too Comfortable, a book by David Rakoff published by Broadway Books, Doubleday (225 pages, $12.95 paperback, ISBN 0767916034).

Consumers of alternative urban humor essays may feel like Goldilocks these days. They have tried the biting wit of Fran Lebowitz, but her writing is not prolific enough to satisfy. They have tried the sardonic observations of David Sedaris, but his writing can be a bit too raunchy for some tastes. They have tried the stinging confessions of Augusten Burroughs, but his writing may lack the world view many readers need for nourishment.

Along comes David Rakoff. Ahhh, just right.

Rakoff’s second collection of essays, titled Don’t Get Too Comfortable, now available in its paperback edition, sets a permanent place for him at the table of artful kvetchers. Rakoff is a frequent contributor to “This American Life” on Public Radio International and his work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Salon and Gentleman’s Quarterly. In keeping with the current publishing trend of maximizing precious talk show minutes by attaching impossibly long and overly descriptive subtitles to books, this one has such a tag that reads, “The Indignities of Coach Class, the Torments of Low Thread Count, the Never-Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems.”

If there is a common theme to these various essays, it is that phrase “First World Problems.” Rakoff has nothing but creative contempt for drinkers of single malt Scotch who need compatible ice cubes frozen from a Scottish Highland river FedEx-ed to their doorstep. He feels “we have become an army of multiply chemically sensitive, high-maintenance princesses trying to make our way through a world full of irksome peas.”