Sedaris is a kind of Everyloser, who ends up in all manner of dead-end jobs and then manages to make the worst of them. Fortunately for him, he writes like a comic angel, so by the time his wretched fumblings with life hit the page, they are transmuted into hilariously bitchy and picaresque prose.

Of course, good satire frequently depends upon exaggeration, and there is little doubt at certain points that the Sedaris imagination is working overtime. But an equal portion of his adventures have the ring of truth, pathetic and unadorned, and this is when Sedaris is at his most amusing and poignant.

Some of the pieces recount his bizarre adventures, such as taking to the road with a thieving quadriplegic, sorting apples in a bleak and freezing factory, volunteering to work at a hospital for the insane, battling a weirdo with a fearsome dildo collection, and a four-day bus trip from hell from North Carolina to Oregon which, he says, 'breaks down to roughly 75,000 hours if one is travelling without the aid of a strong animal tranquiliser'.

At the end of this odyssey, he lands a job helping a born-again pervert make clocks in the shape of Oregon.

He is a captive of life's banal procession of fools, yet Sedaris is often the chief court jester. On the nightmare bus trip, he is duped out of his seat, and is almost beaten up when he tries to reclaim it. He then has to endure endless hours standing as he watches the seat thief and her protector begin making out.

In A Plague of Tics, he tells of his childhood plunge into obsessive-compulsive behaviour, which compelled him to count his steps, lick light switches, kiss stairs and stroke his nose against the stove and refrigerator.

He later graduates to weird noises: 'These were not words, but sounds that satisfied an urge I'd never before realised.

'The sounds were delivered not in my voice but in that of a thimble-sized, temperamental diva clinging to the base of my uvula.' The most memorable character, apart from Sedaris, is his mother, a caustic comedienne whose sarcasm knows no bounds. 'It's a real stretch, but I'm betting you're here about the tiny voices,' she tells his concerned seventh-grade teacher.

'I'm thinking of either taking him to an exorcist or buying him a doll so he can bring home some money as a ventriloquist.' It obviously still grieves him that while he loved his mother greatly, and was her favourite, theirs was not a family where love was readily expressed. 'I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that,' she tells him, when he says 'I love you' as she lies dying of cancer.

This prompts Sedaris to reflect: 'It was queer to say such a thing to someone unless you were trying to talk them out of money or into bed . . . I had known people who said such things to their parents, I love you, but it always translated to mean I'd love to get off the phone with you.' Upon realising he is gay, he forces his brothers and sisters to sign a contract swearing never to marry. 'My fear was that, once married, my sisters would turn their backs on the family, choosing to spend their vacations and holidays with their husbands. One by one they would abandon us until it was just me and my parents, eating our turkey and stuffing off TV trays.' The book ends with the story from which the title is drawn. Naked sees Sedaris set off for a nudist camp, and his description of its inmates does not make for pretty prose.

He reaches life's nadir as he is forced to confront his naked self in the mirrored glasses of a nudist, plucking potato chip crumbs from his pubic hair and wondering what it all means.

Of course, it is also tempting to wonder if he only visited the camp because he knew it would make killer material - a suspicion which haunts several of his more outlandish adventures, yet does nothing to diminish their hilarity.

NAKED by David Sedaris Little, Brown, $220