AND NOW, FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY EXPATRIATE

PARIS —  If you believe him, David Sedaris has moved to Paris to suffer.

Sure, there are the Luxembourg Gardens, a short walk from the writer’s Latin Quarter apartment. Weekends browsing for furniture at the city’s flea markets. Trips to the house in Normandy where he and his longtime love Hugh Hamrick have summered for the past six years. His favorite medical curiosities shop just down the street. And, perhaps best of all, the unalienable right to smoke in the bank, the phone store, the airport and virtually every public and private space in the land.

But behind the romantic curtain of expatriate life, as Truman Capote once observed, lurk pitchforks and fire.

In the United States, Sedaris is a best-selling author and a popular public-radio commentator known for his wickedly hilarious satires of everyday life. In France, he is that most lowly of creatures: a foreigner. If he is a subtle master of his native tongue, here he is a linguistic Neanderthal who must struggle--often grunting and pointing--to buy Band-Aids, haggle with the plumber, make himself understood to the butcher. The perfect setting in which to write his first novel.

“I’m more comfortable writing from that viewpoint,” Sedaris says one afternoon in early October, in his still sparsely furnished living room on the Rue St. Jacques, making his way through a pack of Kools. “In America, for me right now, things seem to be a little bit different in that I have options--whether I choose to exercise them or not. And I thought it would help to go somewhere where I didn’t.”

It would be tempting to imagine that Sedaris, like the narrator of one of his stories, would have longed to run with the beautiful people of “One Life to Live.” But after he read his now legendary “Santaland Diaries” on National Public Radio one morning in 1992--the dark and sardonic account of working as a Macy’s Christmas elf that launched his career--the onetime house cleaner’s New York phone began to ring with offers to write for television and to try his luck in Hollywood.

He turned them down then and continues to do so. Nothing, he says, could tempt him away from the typewriter, where he spends most evenings. A boyish-looking 41-year-old of 5-foot-5 with a gap-toothed grin and a wandering eye, Sedaris likes to point out that he thinks he is not very good-looking. He hates to have his photograph taken--the one kind of public appearance Sedaris approves of is a reading, where he gets to test new work on a live audience. When he reads an hour’s worth of unpublished material Friday at UCLA’s Royce Hall as part of a tour of the U.S., he will include anecdotes based on his first weeks in France.

What audiences won’t be hearing is a chapter from his novel. Despite a contract in hand, he hasn’t quite gotten to it yet.

“I have no idea how to write a novel,” he says. “I never had any inclination to write one.” In the meantime, he has been writing short stories and essays for Esquire magazine and NPR’s “This American Life” about his first day of French class, house hunting and getting used to how the French do things.

“I don’t like any physical contact. When I came to France, I thought, ‘Thank God I will never have to hug anyone again.’ But then there’s the kissing thing,” he says with an air of dread. “And if you don’t do it, people get really offended. Who wants to be kissed by me? It’s really not that much of a treat.”

Paris is already proving to be a rich source of material. “It’s fun picking and choosing which is the best story about being humiliated,” he says. “I would be incapable of writing . . . like, what’s a big issue in Paris right now? I mean, I have no idea. I mean, like, personally I have issues. Like to me, the biggest issue in Paris is the butcher on the corner.”

All subjects lead back to the butcher this gray afternoon, in the third week of Sedaris’ Parisian life.

“You’d think the butcher and I had some long-standing feud that went back generations,” he begins. “Every day I go there, he scolds me for something else. And yesterday his wife scolded me” for innocently putting his bag of meat on what was apparently the wrong shelf. “There’s always something they can scold me about.”

When Sedaris is not being derided by the butcher, there is his French teacher at the Alliance Francaise, a chalk-throwing polyglot who insults her students in their native languages. “Nothing you say or do is right, nothing,” he says, shaking his head. “If you have the answer right, then you pronounced the word wrong.”

Reign of terror aside, he says, she’s a good teacher. “All I do is my homework, that’s all I do,” he offers, explaining why he doesn’t have time to write his novel. “It’s frustrating to be a writer, and to work that hard on a sentence like ‘Maurice lives alone, but sometimes he dines with his mother.’ ”

Sedaris goes to class for two hours each day and spends another couple of hours checking and rechecking his homework. Then he studies his own vocabulary flashcards, made from overheard conversations or reading issues of Voici, France’s celebrity gossip rag.

He’s determined to learn French, he claims, although his strategy does not include speaking to actual French people. “When I’m on the street I say, ‘Please don’t talk to me, please don’t talk to me, please don’t talk to me,’ ” he says, his shoulders crouched in remembered terror.

So far this hasn’t been much of a problem. “No French person’s gonna befriend me. It’s just too much work,” he says with a laugh.

Sedaris had his first taste of culture shock in the third grade, when he and his family moved from New York to Raleigh, N.C. One of six children, Sedaris was a nervous child who licked light switches and compulsively hit himself over the head with his shoe. His father, Lou, is a retired engineer and his mother, Sharon, who died in 1991, was a chain-smoking housewife whose sharp wit helped Sedaris shape his own comic voice.

After a series of odd jobs that included work at a mental hospital, and half-hearted attempts at two colleges, Sedaris enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago at age 27. But he had been keeping a diary since he was 20, and writing, not art, was his secret passion. His professors, used to bored art students filling requirements, gave him lots of personal attention, and he stayed on after graduation to teach writing for two years. In 1990, he moved to New York, paying the rent by cleaning apartments and publishing his work in small journals.

After his debut on NPR, magazine editors from the New Yorker and Esquire and book publishers called asking for more. “Barrel Fever,” a collection of short stories and essays, was published in 1994, followed by a collection of fiction, “Naked,” in 1997 and his Christmas stories, “Holidays on Ice,” also in 1997. All were met by glowing reviews, earning him comparisons with J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain and Nathanael West.

Sedaris and his sister, actress Amy Sedaris, also write acclaimed plays under the name of the Talent Family, in which Amy Sedaris always stars. Said the New York Times in a 1997 review of “Incident at Cobbler’s Knob”: “The brother-and-sister playwriting team has an unparalleled ear for American cultural cliches and an equally fine hand for twisting those cliches into devastating absurdity.”

Not all writers have perfect pitch when it comes to performing their own work. But if Sedaris is searingly funny and original on the page in his loosely autobiographical tales, his reading voice--he calls it “high-pitched and girlish”-- makes his commentaries on NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “This American Life” even funnier.

“A lot of people tell me that when they read him, they hear his voice from the radio,” says NPR’s Ira Glass, who produces all his radio segments. “That’s an odd thing for a contemporary writer.”

Sedaris says it bothers him when people accuse him of being deliberately un-PC. He insists he’s just presenting his worldview: “I thought I was free to say what I wanted to. It should be standard for somebody to write what they want to write.” In “Front Row Center With Thaddeus Bristol,” Sedaris wrote about a New York theater critic who gets demoted to the suburbs to review children’s plays, among them “A Christmas Carol.” “I said that Tiny Tim was miscast because he was black, and the only reason why he was cast was because he did a good limp, because he had lost his left foot to diabetes,” Sedaris recalls.

After the piece aired on NPR, a woman wrote to him, demanding that he apologize to Lamar Williams, the boy in the story, and his family. When Sedaris wrote back, telling her the story was made up, she nevertheless insisted she was going to boycott the radio program and its sponsors, and write a letter to the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation asking them to blacklist him until he met her demands.

“What makes the story funny is that he was given this job as a critic and that he would be that hard on children, not the children’s misfortune,” Sedaris says. “I’m always shocked by this attitude in the United States--that you’re always writing about an entire group of people, not about a single person,” he says. “I’m always amazed by this notion that all of a sudden you could stamp your feet and you could write a letter to say you’re very offended by such and such and then you could somehow make it go away.”

For the most part, however, his critics are drowned out in the laughter of his ardent fans. Glass says there’s a moral vision behind the comedy: “One of the things that makes him so popular and makes the work satisfying is that you can feel that he has a picture of what’s right and what’s wrong. Without that, he would be more like a traditional humorist.

“There are stories you can imagine Steven Spielberg reading and thinking, ‘Hmmm,’ in a very glowy, the-family-is-intact, people-are-loving-each-other sort of way,” Glass says. “Even though the mother is sitting at the kitchen table smoking and drinking and with a cigarette in her hand, and the children are hanging on her every word, and the father is out of sight in the other room.”

Sedaris writes in the first person, which allows him to imagine and embroider his stories into a heightened comic state. He says the hardest assignment he ever had was being sent to the medical examiner’s office in Phoenix for an Esquire piece. “I’d never really done any reporting before,” he says. “It was really hard to tell the truth, which I am really not inclined to do. I would write something and think, ‘Oh, that’s great,’ and then I would think, ‘Well, no one said that.’ I would have to use my notes and my tape recorder [to see] what they did say. If I was writing for myself it wouldn’t have been a lie, it just would have been tweaking things a little bit.”

But he’s being cautious about what his portrayal of these early days in France.

“I don’t want to generalize about French people and be wrong, because it’s too early for me to be generalizing,” he says. “I’m just writing about things I notice. I can go somewhere with Hugh, and he would notice one thing, like the light reflected off the buildings. But I notice the guy on the Metro who made a wooden leg for his German shepherd,” he says.

Hamrick lived in Paris for several years before they met and speaks fluent French, and the pair had planned to stay in Paris for a year, but Sedaris says that he’s already thinking that might not be long enough. Who knows how long it’s going to take for him to learn French, furnish his apartment, write that novel and figure out how to make the butcher like him.

“I don’t count the butcher as an enemy yet,” he says, with a hopeful glimmer in his eye. “So far I think it’s just a standard business relationship.”

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“David Sedaris in Performance,” UCLA, Royce Hall, Westwood. Friday, 8 p.m. $15-$25. (310) 825-2101. The event, inaugurating UCLA’s “Word of Mouth” series, is sponsored by Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and KCRW-89.9 FM