Rude bad, manners good
SOCIAL AFFAIRS A new lament from that Eats and Shoots lady
More of a protracted rant against insensitive people than any kind of identifiable story, Lynne Truss’s Talk to the Hand, the follow- up to the grammatical head-scratcher that was Eats, Shoots & Leaves, approaches a mundane subject with boundless ambition. As Truss advises in her rather anti- climatic conclusion: “ Rudeness is bad. Manners are good.” And with this book, she aims to do for manners what her previous bestseller tried and sadly failed to do for punctuation: get the whole world with the program.
That’s a noble goal, as anyone who has ever kindly held a door open only to watch some selfabsorbed twit glide through without a grunt of thanks will attest. But it’s not likely to happen any time soon. Especially since, by Truss’s own reckoning, she is largely preaching to the converted. Those who care enough to spend time pondering how one’s deportment impacts others are already holding open doors at malls across the Western world. They probably don’t own cellphones or skateboards, items the author finds especially vexing. Besides, decorum failures such as jaywalking and fashion crimes are pretty much unenforceable.
Truss concedes as much in her introduction but marches forth nevertheless: “ Just as my book on punctuation was fundamentally about finding oneself mysteriously at snapping point about something that seemed a tad trivial compared with war, famine and the imminent overthrow of the Western civiliza-
tion, so is Talk to the Hand. I just want to describe and analyse an automatic eruption of outrage and frustration that can at best cloud an otherwise lovely day, and at worst make you resolve to chuck yourself off the nearest bridge.”
While Truss’s complaints are valid, humanity’s lack of manners is a pretty thin excuse for a book, or at least, and excuse me ever so much for saying so, a poor excuse for this book. About the only thing that elevates Talk to the Hand
above pure dross, to ape Truss’s preferred Britslang, is the author’s keen sense of humour, often at her own expense.
“ Shame is now such a quaint, bygone concept that one feels almost embarrassed to bring it up,” she writes. “ Things used to be different. My own childhood, and the childhood of many others of my generation, was marked by episodes of this redhot, moiling state of self- blame . . . that left me so psychologically flailed, scorched, eviscerated, and hobbled that it’s a miracle I can drag myself about.”
Touché. And while Truss allows that she may be a member in good standing of the fuddyduddy brigade — indeed, she frequently comes off as a mother hen scolding her ignorant flock — in the end it just doesn’t matter. Talk to the Hand’s daft premise and lightweight prose cannot possibly spark a revolution. Only some kind of societal sea change will permit choice bus seats to suddenly be occupied by the pregnant and the elderly, and for such words as “ sorry” and “please” to re-enter the public lexicon in a meaningful way. But thanks very much for reading. Kim Hughes is a Toronto-based writer and editor.