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Binchy is one of the few novelists whose newest books I always make a point to read. She’s classic comfort food–not great literature, but decently-written, heartwarming stories that don’t leave a sticky or soggy aftertaste. One of the best things about her books is that the central characters always change for the better in a believable way. They may be in sad situations, but over the course of the novel they somehow find the courage to grow and overcome their personal flaws a little bit. Love, kindness, and hope are always central. I can make these generalizations because Binchy’s books are not wildly different from each other. It’s not necessarily a problem, but it’s why they are comfort food–you pretty much know what you’re going to get.

Nights is middle-grade Binchy. She’s left the precincts of her native Ireland again, which can be nice for a change (although it’s unintentionally hilarious when she puts Irish idioms in the mouths of supposed Americans, eg having one of them say to another, “Will we do X?” where an American would really say, “Let’s do X.”) There’s a motley assortment of characters whose fates intertwine: four tourists stuck in the small Greek village of Aghia Anna, after a terrible boat accident paralyzes traffic in and out. We have a young woman in love with a jerk, a young man who’s escaping from his smothering family, a woman running away from her lover, and a recently-divorced dad who’s agonizing over relations with his son. They join Andreas, the elderly proprietor of the tavern where they meet, who is alienated from his son, and Vonni, an Irish ex-pat who sees the fix for everyone’s problems but her own.

And that’s the lever that moves all the action: each of the characters can see how silly or blind the others are being, and gently help them react to their own situations differently. The power of friendship is another nice Binchy emphasis. Inevitably, as these random people become friends, they care about each other and we care about them. The satisfactory happy endings come as each person finds the strength to deal with his or her problems, and the reader is left with a feeling of optimism about ordinary human beings. Now that’s my kind of fiction!

The resilience of kids is a byword, but at the age of eight Kevin Sweeney came up with a novel way of dealing with the loss of his father. He decided to choose three men to be his surrogate dads–without telling them, he’d observe and emulate them. A terrific premise, but alas this book doesn’t deliver quite as much as it promises. It’s still an occasionally touching look at a hardscrabble San Francisco Irish childhood.

Sweeney explains in the introduction that the book grew out of an essay he wrote for Salon in 2001. (The original essay says he was 7 when he came up with his plan; presumably he subsequently found the correct age in the journal he kept.) The deaths of many young fathers on 9/11 prompted him to think about his coping strategy, and he wanted both to reassure families left fatherless and to encourage other men to be role models. I just read that essay, and it’s wonderful. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t very succesfully flesh out the essay, and what’s been added to pad it out to full length is just not as compelling as the original.

Memoirs are as thick as dandelions these days. If the author’s not a household name, doesn’t have a truly compelling and unusual story to tell, or doesn’t write like an angel, it’s tough for yet another autobiography to stand out. The Sweeneys are averagely interesting people with an averagely interesting story; what’s compelling is Kevin’s idea, but we don’t learn much about what prompted him to come up with it. He describes being eight years old, lying in bed and worrying that he won’t know how to be a good father, a good man, because he doesn’t have “the classic reference point–my old man.” Isn’t that in itself a rather remarkable train of thought for an eight-year-old? But as an adult, Sweeney has difficulty reconnecting enough with his child self to explain it to us. “My scheme had a formality and simplicity that makes me wonder now about why I felt this need so clearly,” he says. The idea was his first journal entry, but reading one’s old journals can sometimes be like reading that of a stranger’s–it isn’t always possible to reconstruct the self who wrote them.

After describing his family–how his father died when Sweeney was three, leaving six children, how his mother worked tirelessly and his oldest brother became the male head of the household–Sweeney goes on to introduce the three men he chose to be his subsitute fathers, but that only takes a few pages for each. The rest of the book is taken up with Sweeney’s youth: inheriting his brother’s paper route, playing baseball, pranks and mischief (he and his friends used to collect gunpowder from used casings at the Navy base and use it to blow things up), learning to drink in high school, and so forth. We hear a little bit about his interactions with his chosen fathers, notably the one “man to man” talk which got him off the path towards excessive drinking. But until the conclusion, which briefly analyses what he learned from each of the three, it’s not really much about them. There’s some insight into the damage repression of grief does; the family doesn’t talk about their dad and his death until the kids are grown.

As a side note, Father Figures has an arrestingly hideous cover–extreme closeup of a boy sitting and holding an enormous orange balloon(?) in front of him, cropped so that all you see is one dirty scabbed knee, ugly shorts, a bit of T-shirt and arm, and one quarter of an orange circle taking up most of the cover. It’s unsettling in a way the book absolutely isn’t, and I think it might make people who might enjoy the book hesitate to pick it up, while suggesting some dark tale of child abuse to others who would then be disappointed.

Lerner is among the best of the self-help authors–she’s pragmatic, insightful, funny, literate, and avoids one-size-fits-all/magic pill claims. (Of course, the downside of realism is missing the excitement of “this will solve ALL my problems!”–which is what drives bestsellerdom.) Lerner gives a brief overview of the book’s layout in the first chapter, which ends:

…the brief epilogue reveals the six secret, simple, specific steps you can take to banish unwanted anxiety, fear, and shame from your life forever. Just kidding, but yes, that would be nice.

This book is a good exploration of emotions that fuel unhappiness, with some practical exercises, though it’s not as structured as the most detailed self-help books. Lerner’s primary technique is to weave anecdotes and reflections together into a narrative. It’s a more philosophical approach than most, and more enjoyable to read and think about.

Lerner draws interesting distinctions between behaviors in the face of stress, like underfunctioning and overfunctioning (I can see that I do both in different circumstances). She does describe a sort of “magic” solution which is pretty cool. A man was terrified of asking a co-worker out on a date. Lerner asked him to go to a shopping mall in a city he was visiting and collect 75 rejections in a row by asking women out to coffee. The process helped him realize that it would be easier to just ask out his co-worker than to finish!

The chapter on public speaking, and how its principles can apply to difficult private situations, is especially good. I also found the section on dealing with anxiety in organizations particularly novel and useful.

But my favorite aspect of Fear and Other Uninvited Guests is Lerner’s bracing and refreshing realism. When she shows people talking to their parents about sensitive topics, for example, there’s no “Honey, you’re right–thank you for pointing that out!” conclusion. Instead, the parents storm out and the adult child is left shaking with nerves. But the focus is on having the courage to speak up respectfully and constructively, and the participants end up feeling better even if there’s no huge breakthrough. The epilogue is titled “Everyone Freaks Out,” which encapsulates the whole approach. Anxiety, fear, and shame won’t go away, but facing them with courage and calm can help.

An assortment of essays, mostly quite good, about commitment & relationships. It’s sort of a sequel to The Bitch in the House, which I haven’t read, and similarly marketed as “representatives of the opposite sex reveal the TRUTH about how they feel.” As I say, these are good essays, some even brilliant, but if they strike you as containing any earth-shattering revelations, you haven’t been paying enough attention to the aforesaid opposite sex as people, instead of stereotypes.

Which leads to the most striking passage (to me), in the foreward, where Cathi Hanauer (editor of Bitch in the House) describes the reactions people had to the concept for this book:

I was told, “It’ll never work.” “Men don’t think.” “Men have no interest in self-exploration or revelation.” “Men don’t feel things.” “Men won’t say anything negative about their wives.” “Men have no interior lives.” “Men just want to watch TV and read the paper.” I didn’t believe it. Okay, I believed some of it. But not all of it, not really.

Now take those sentences & replace “men” with “women,” “blacks,” “Asians,” “gays,” or any other group, and add whatever negative stereotypes you think of. (Although it’s kind of tough to imagine something more sweepingly insulting than “don’t think” and “don’t feel things!”) Can you see the new paragraph appearing as-is in a book issued by a major publisher, with no more emphatic commentary than the last bit?

I can’t say I’m surprised by this, unfortunately, but it bothers me a lot. It’s a symptom of why on the whole I prefer to identify myself as an egalitarian (all humans deserve the same rights and access to opportunities) rather than a feminist (since that focuses specifically on women’s rights, although I don’t discount the importance of the feminist movement in the 20th century). Would the world be a better place if it were run by women? I doubt it; I think it would be bad in different ways (just like when any previously-oppressed group comes to power). We’re all human beings, after all, basically monkeys with language and culture, and we struggle with similar problems and tensions.

Nevertheless, certainly in American culture there are some generalizations that can be made about the roles of men and women (keeping in mind that no generalization should be used to predict an individual’s behavior or attitudes). Over the past 40 or 50 years, there’s been an enormous change in the expectations–both women’s and men’s–of how a man could and should act. The essays in Bastard on the Couch don’t shed any blinding light on this topic, but they do offer some interesting, poignant, and thought-provoking flashlight beams on a few areas.

The twenty-seven essays are divided into four sections: “Hunting and Gathering” (sex/monogamy/adultery), “Can’t Be Trusted With Simple Tasks” (household responsibilities in marriage), “Bicycles for Fish,” (a grab-bag, but mostly about role reversals), and “All I Need,”(sad endings). They’re all interesting the way any honest self-revelations are (except Anthony “Jarhead” Swofford’s essay, which feels narcissistic and fake).

Daniel Jones says in “Chivalry on Ice:”

The gestures of chivalry may have been inherently patronizing and obsolete, but my liberation from having to perform them had the side effect of dulling my caretaking instincts, of turning me into someone who would cheer my wife on in one breath (“You can do it yourself!”) only to brush her off in the next (“You can do it yourself’).

This touches on a problem many of these essays dance around: in the absense of traditional gender roles, it’s easy to flail around instead of doing the work of figuring out how to be kind and helpful and supportive to each other based on what each individual needs and wants.

Funny but fundamentally very sad (how do relationships evolve into this awful dynamic?) is Christopher Russell’s “My List of Chores,” where he shares his wife’s daily harangues and general distrust of his competence, which he passively resists, causing her to go even more over the top.

In “Ward and June R Us,” Rob Spillman describes how he and his wife put an end to constant bickering over chores by switching traditional roles each week, so that they take turns being “June” (in charge of all parenting and domestic duties) and “Ward” (come home, relax, and play with the kids guilt-free).

Robert Skates shows the fallout from divorces around him (his own marriage long over) in “The Hole in the Window: A View of Divorce.” At the end, he generously allows his son and his son’s ex-stepfather to hang out together, commiserating over the shock of that second divorce which has split them apart.

Other standouts are Steve Friedman’s “A Bachelor’s Fears,” funny and finally touching; Rob Jackson’s heartwarming “My Life as a Housewife;” and Trey Ellis, “Father of the Year,” funny and poignant.

The fourth in the Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin series, and great in yet a different way. The book opens with Aubrey at home in Hampshire, now married to Sophie and finding that domestic living is not all that he had hoped.

This cottage, though picturesque among its ash trees and even romantic, ideally suited for two in the early days of his marriage, was neither large nor comfortable; it had always been low-ceilinged, pokey and inconvenient, but now that it also contained two babies, a niece, a ruined mother-in-law, some large pieces of furniture … and a couple of servants, it was something like the Black Hole of Calcutta, except that whereas the Hole was hot, dry and airless, Ashgrove Cottage let in draughts from all sides, while the damp rising from the floor joined the leaks in the roof to form pools in many of the rooms.

It’s a comic beginning; O’Brian describes the infant twin girls thus: “They had pale, globular faces, and in the middle of each face a surprisingly long and pointed nose called the turnip to an impartial observer’s mind.” But very soon Maturin has arranged what both Jack and Sophie want most, Aubrey’s return to a sailing ship.

Aubrey is appointed temporary Commodore in charge of retaking the island of Mauritius from the French. One of the things I’ve liked about this series from the start is the insights into work relationships. Aubrey is now supervising not just a crew, at which he’s an expert, but other captains, and that’s a whole new set of problems and sensitivities. The showy, competitive Lord Clonfert, who measures himself against Aubrey and resents his success, is a particularly well-drawn tragic character. O’Brian is masterful at allusions (often subtle) which capture the truth of the situation. Here’s Maturin reflecting on what ultimately happens to Clonfert’s rivalry with Aubrey:

Stephen … looked at Jack with his pale, expressionless eyes, looking objectively at his friend, tall, sanguine, almost beefy, full of health, rich, and under his kindly though moderate concern happy and even triumphant. He thought, ‘You cannot blame the bull because the frog burst: the bull has no comprehension of the affair…’

The complex political games and jockeying for position in the Navy and the government at large are also highlighted in this volume. Maturin’s role as a valuable spy for the British gives him the power to turn the wheels to Aubrey’s advantage, another plot thread neatly worked out. Since there are 16 volumes yet to come, and Aubrey is already into middle age and rising fast in the ranks, I wonder what’s in store for him. There are hints that Maturin is seriously depressed; in the first volume I found O’Brian’s opaqueness frustrating, but now it’s part of the charm that leads one on to the next book.

An unforgettable memoir of Patchett’s friendship with writer Lucy Grealy. Of course it’s beautifully-written, as one would expect from the author of Bel Canto, and of course it’s sad, since Grealy died young and suffered physically and emotionally all her life. It’s also an honest, funny, evocative, involving story that is impossible to put down, whose central character is neither Ann nor Lucy but the friendship itself.

Patchett uses the metaphor of the ant and the grasshopper throughout the book; she the ant, valuing stability and middle-class values, Grealy the improvident grasshopper, cavalier about money and obligations.

And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn’t tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter.

Patchett brilliantly shows the evolution of this friendship, where each found in the other something she craved, and the contrast between their characters.

Twelve years of Catholic school had taught me that I would be held accountable not only for what I did, but for everything I considered doing. Twelve years of beating cancer had taught Lucy that she was invincible and that nothing, none of it, was ever going to catch up with her.

Truth & Beauty brings the charming, exasperating Grealy fully back to life; her bottomless loneliness and neediness, her enormous charisma and endearing quirks (like her love of being carried), her zest and zaniness, all make her an unforgettable character. Most of us have probably known someone like her in tone if not in volume. She was the author of Autobiography of a Face, which I read a long time ago and don’t remember much about except that it was good; it’s about her disfiguring bout with cancer as a child that resulted in loss of much of her jaw. Patchett heart-breakingly chronicles Grealy’s many failed surgeries in the quest for a mouth that would work properly.

Patchett herself seems like a rarer find–her unstinting generosity to her friend (primarily emotional, but financial too) is remarkable. She’s creative about it; Grealy avoids her mail by tossing it all in a Hefty bag, and Patchett finally convinces her to ship it to Nashville so that Patchett can deal with it for her. Not long before she dies, Grealy says: “But at least I can make you feel like a saint. That’s what you’ve always wanted.” Patchett responds, “That’s a terrible thing to say,” but it crystallized for me something I’d been feeling through the book; Patchett is such a good friend, such a tower of strength and patience, that I can’t help realizing how in the same situation I would probably fall short of the standard she sets. But by way of explanation, she says early on:

I decided that night I would take all the hours of my life that could so easily be spent worrying and instead I would try to help her. I had been raised by Catholic nuns who told us in no uncertain terms that work was the path to God, and that while it was a fine thing to feel loyalty and devotion in your heart, it would be much better for everyone involved if you could find the physical manifestations of your good thoughts and see them put into action. The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry? I decided then that my love for Lucy would have to manifest in deeds.

A philosophy to live by, no matter what your belief system. It’s a very thought-provoking book, full of beautifully expressed insights and anecdotes small and large, and I copied down a dozen passages I’m tempted to quote.

Ultimately the ant couldn’t save the grasshopper, who felt the ant life was a stifling one. In the last section, Grealy’s early death starts to feel inevitable. We join Patchett in her grief. After reading Bel Canto (in which dozens of people with no common language rely on a translator), this passage was especially meaningful:

Even when Lucy was devastated or difficult, she was the person I knew best in the world, the person I was the most comfortable with. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

It’s also a fascinating window into the literary writing world, including the round of writing colonies and fellowships. One of the best books I’ve read this year!

More interesting than the usual run of celebrity tell-alls, but ultimately somewhat depressing. I don’t know a ton about Sinatra; I respect his singing more than I like it, but he’s fascinating as an iconic showbiz figure.

Like many children of my generation (I was born in 1964), I watched early Warner Brothers cartoons which caricatured famous Hollywood people without having a clue who they were until much later. But the Frank Sinatra chicken in Swooner Crooner made an impression on me. As a teen I laughed at Joe Piscopo’s impression of Frank singing “Under My Thumb” (his only funny skit, as I recall). Many years later, I took care of a lady with Alzheimer’s whose happiest moments were spent listening to Tommy Dorsey records, and so I heard many early Sinatra classics over and over again. I read The Way You Wear Your Hat when it came to the library (don’t remember much about it) because of the wonderful title and cover. The shadow of Sinatra is still everywhere in American culture; from the Ocean’s 11 and Manchurian Candidate remakes to the resurgence of 50s cool (granted, that’s old already, but I’m sure there are better examples), his presence is inescapable. So a book by his valet is a natural draw.

The opening is killer: “Summer 1968. The only man in America who was less interested than me in sleeping with Mia Farrow was her husband and my boss, Frank Sinatra.” Dancing with Mia at a club (& subsequent rumors of an affair) led to Sinatra cutting off Jacobs overnight, as Jacobs had seen him to do so many other people. Then we go to the standard chronological narrative; a brief overview of Jacobs’ life, his employment with Swifty Lazar, and then the day that Sinatra wooed him away in 1953. Until the blow-up in 1968, Jacobs accompanied Sinatra around the world, cooked his favorite food, baby-sat his lovers, ran his errands, put up with awful practical jokes, cleaned up after his tantrums, and befriended his family.

“No man is a hero to his valet,” and yet Jacobs effectively communicates how much he loved “Mr. S.” Frank Sinatra comes across as a guy with many good qualities (generous, thoughtful, humble, basically unbigoted) spoiled by success. Jacobs bore with his temper, insecurity, crude sense of humor, and occasional cruelty for the sake of the “vulnerable, real” person he saw underneath, and of course for the amazing perks and prestige that went with being right-hand man to the Chairman of the Board. Getting fired was a crushing blow for Jacobs, and it’s easy to believe that it was a terrible mistake for the increasingly lonely and isolated Sinatra to get rid of someone who saw him for who he was and yet loved him.

The most interesting part of the book is the inside view of the structure and social distinctions of Hollywood, Mafia, and political circles, and the connections between them. I knew Joseph Kennedy (JFK’s father) was unsavory, but Jacobs says of him: “Mr. Ambassador, if anyone had the guts to spit in his face, a bravery that my boss sadly lacked, should have been called Mr. Asshole.” (Just noticed the rather strange sentence construction there–this is mostly a well-written book, but there are some flaws). He backs it up with first-hand observations, and shows that “Joe was mobbed up to his fancy collar pins.” Blech. Jacobs liked JFK himself, but all the future President wanted to talk about was sex.

“What do you want? Jack?” I asked. [JFK had just insisted that Jacobs call him Jack.]

“I want to fuck every woman in Hollywood,” he said with a big leering grin.

The book is stuffed with gossipy tidbits about the many famous people Sinatra knew–Marilyn Monroe, Garbo & Dietrich, the Lawfords, Billie Holliday, Noel Coward & Cole Porter, Lawrence Harvey, Judy Garland, Bogart & Bacall, and lots more. Jacobs shows the long-suffering first Mrs. Sinatra, alluring Ava Gardner (whom he describes as the true love of Frank’s life), and manipulative, ambitious Mia Farrow. It doesn’t feel like Jacobs is dishing dirt in a titillating way, but it ultimately leaves a bad taste. Most of the stars come off like Sinatra–people who might have been decent once upon a time, or if things had gone differently, but whose bad impulses have been allowed to predominate by constant catering-to.

This book straddles the fence in a strange way: it’s too thoughtful and observant to be quite a light-hearted juicy gossip fest, but too emotionally flat and non-judgemental to be as thought-provoking and involving as it could be. I’d like more perspective on why George Jacobs would let Frank Sinatra become his life, to the extent that the “after Frank” section of the book feels hollow. Nonetheless, it’s an enjoyable read and a must for people who like Sinatra and/or Hollywood stories.

“Have you read it yet?” I always hate that “yet”— as if, by being members of a specific demographic (college-educated humanists?), we’re all somehow obligated to ingest whatever the publishing industry, seconded by our peers, designates — regardless of our individual tastes and interests.

Personally, I haven’t read most of them yet. But I did recently read Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by Lynne Truss. I began writing a "mixed review" after an initial skimming of Truss’s book. When I went back to read it more carefully, I discovered the book to be both better and much, much worse than I’d realized. I confess that I still did not read every word, but I think I’ve done it justice.

The book is better than I first realized in that there really is quite a bit of engaging, intelligent, self-effacing wit to it — in certain sections. But after my second reading, I find that its conceptual shortcomings amount to a fatal ridiculousness. And an immensely popular book on language that blurs a rich enthusiasm for the delicacy of good usage with a confused attack on everything from true mistakes to trendy trademarks to email emoticons is worse than ridiculous. It’s destructive.

I care a lot about clear expression. I treasure punctuation. I spend a lot of my time thinking about the best way to say things, whether it be orally or in writing. But I think that Lynne Truss is an irresponsible, half-baked alarmist. She’s a self-described “Stickler” for correct punctuation and good style. So what? I’m not, personally, prepared to rush up and congratulate her simply for insisting on correct use of the apostrophe — though I do favor that policy myself and wince when I see it done wrong by others. And though she likes to present herself as a sage and stalwart champion of the English language, as far as I can tell she’s more an unfocused, unsubstantiated kvetcher than an impassioned expert user.

I’ve had it "up to here" with people who extrapolate from a justified scorn for the ever-present eyesore of bad writing to an apocalyptic lament that literate culture is spinning rapidly down the drain. The fact that each generation of intelligentsia — if I’m not mistaken — includes loud exponents of this viewpoint should in itself render it suspect.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves is intelligent where it’s about things regarding which the author seems to have personal expertise (e.g. the map of the punctuation aficianado subculture) or where she’s really done her homework (e.g. the colorful, often surprising, and sometimes controversial history of various punctuation marks). But the work is beyond embarrassing where it attacks (in both senses of the word) subjects that the author is stubbornly obtuse about — mainly the culture of email and instant messaging. Personally, I find it implausible that email and IM are threatening to destroy conventional written discourse. It seems to me the theory behind this perception would imply, erroneously, that email and IM are cognate with older, more formal uses of writing (and could thus risk supplanting them); while the unscientifically-presented empirical basis of this paradigm here just smells to me like the latest round of scapegoating in the perennial pastime of Deploring The Poor State Of Our Young People’s Writing Skills. Okay, maybe today’s high school and college students bring IM conventions into their lousy term papers. Well, if all they’re writing outside of school is IM — the logical implication — then I would suggest that a generation ago they weren’t writing outside of school at all. Was that better? And weren’t the term papers just as lousy, even without eschewed capitalization and “u” for “you”?

To me, it would seem obvious that email, IM and chat are, loosely speaking, filling roles previously filled by telephone conversation or passing secret notes in class or gabbing on a park bench (or on the street corner or at the market or around the water cooler or over the back fence). They do not, by and large, occupy the niches of scholarly writing; literary writing; or even humdrum, mediocre expository writing (e.g. journalism and business reports). Nor do they usually seem to fill the niche — in either content or form — of personal letters, which began to go out of fashion long before the cyber age. (And when an email does resemble an old-fashioned longhand letter, I venture to say that it reads no worse than the longhand letter that would have been composed by the same author — and not because the email habit has ruined anyone’s letter-writing skills.)

Why should spontaneous, casual emails be held to the standards of published prose, rather than the standards of ephemeral, private dialogue? Goodness, if one is going to deplore the use of ellipses and run-on sentences in email, one might as well criticize one’s friends for saying “um” at one across the café table and trailing off when the server arrives. Though some of us do craft beautiful electronic correspondence suitable for publication or framing, we are the exception. And that reality is, in turn, a reflection of what defines the most common ad-hoc purpose of these media: casual conversation. It is not a case of the medium ruining literary values; that is an irrelevant paradigm, not merely a flawed one.

Does the author think that if email and IM did not exist, all those teenagers and not-very-literary adults would be writing New Yorker essays instead? They would be doing no such thing, of course. Most of those people limit their formal writing to what’s absolutely required of them by school, work, or the occasional social obligation. Most of the “voluntary” formal writing in the world is left to the few who have a special aptitude for writing. But people who are accomplished, comfortable writers do not own the realm of writing. Published writing is their special province — or should be. If technology now makes it easy and appealing for non-writers to type their personal conversations instead of picking up the telephone, it is ridiculous to expect them to write like writers just because they’re using a keypad. Truss even stumbles on this realization herself, though I think she misses the point: "I keep thinking that what we do now, with this medium of instant delivery, isn’t writing . . . . " Well, exactly.

When Truss is tearing her hair out at the semi-literate standards of online self-publishing (e.g. public user reviews on book and film websites), she might have a case — were she to develop it like a proper scholar. (And yet I ask: Are rambling, inarticulate, ignorant user reviews online really that different from rambling, inarticulate, ignorant phone calls to talk radio hosts? I think the fact that it’s in writing is of some significance; but it’s not necessarily of great significance. More significant perhaps is the fact that the online user review, unlike the radio call-in, is on the order of a mass phenomenon.)

But when Truss is referring to personal electronic communication, she has no case at all. And I think she provides far from adequate differentiation, either in her book or in her mind, between these — and among other — distinct uses of the Internet. For example, she claims that the "non-case-sensitive internet" (she evidently chooses to ignore the distinction between URL’s that get you to a web page and the vast assortment of online prose content you might find there) is confusing young people about capitalization — as if they can’t distinguish domain names from the formal sentence-writing they learn in school! (I’m not disputing that some school kids, as well as some semi-literate adults, use aberrant capitalization; I’m just doubting Truss’s suggestion that this is a new problem, and one attributable to the Internet.) Granted, there are grey areas as to what constitutes "personal". Are Usenet postings published discourse or just conversation? (I would answer that this is mostly determined by the approach and attitude of the individual user.) But the fact that there are grey areas only makes it more important to tackle this subject with sophistication and nuance, rather than sputtering in a blind panic.

. . . . Unless perhaps one’s goal is simply to catch the cheapest, fastest route to the Best Seller List. Truss expresses astonishment at her book’s success. I’m not surprised at all. The demographic that sustains the Best Seller List Industry includes many people who would like nothing better than to be given facile license to roll their eyes at what they’re sure is the general barbarism of popular culture, youth culture, and contemporary culture. Don’t get me wrong — there’s plenty of barbarism out there (and there always has been). But a good critic is a fair critic, one who can discriminate among various phenomena that may or may not be related, may or may not be new, may or may not be significant, and may or may not be insidious. This is where the hard work of the scholar comes in, and I don’t see Truss rolling up her sleeves. It’s probably indisputable that well-tempered opinions don’t have the commercial “grab” that overstated, oversimplified diatribes and posturing do. Hence the runaway success of Lynne Truss, who is as sensationalistic, in her way, as any number of superfluous exclamation points.

I do happen to think that the world would be a much better place if people — all people — took more care over their interpersonal communication. But that’s mostly about choosing one’s words carefully, avoiding hasty assumptions, cocking an ear toward how one’s discourse might sound to one’s interlocutor . . . not about whether to replace "for" with "4" or whether it’s good style to habitually end sentences with ellipses. (I am partial to good style, too, but I know the difference between things that substantially improve human relations and things that just spruce up the aesthetics.) And the qualities that enable people to communicate well — whether orally or in writing — are good thinking first and good expression second. One has to bring maturity, sensitivity, and judgment to a situation before one can expect to communicate with delicacy and grace. Horse; cart.

Muddled writing does often reflect muddled thinking (and has always done so, not just since the advent of the personal computer). But let’s keep the cause and effect straight. Poor-quality thinkers — whether they happen to be teens, adults with no higher education, or degree-heavy academics — can indeed betray themselves (in various ways) by their prose. And, yes, learning to use language expertly will help people who think cogently express themselves clearly. And, at a certain point, masterful use of language becomes essential, if one is to express nuances without ambiguity or misunderstanding (which, however, is never guaranteed, no matter how labored and perfect one’s writing, as there’s always that subjective element). One might go so far as to claim that every close personal relationship could benefit from adroit language-use skills. Yes, yes, and yes. But inexpert writing does not cause shabby thinking (or the decline of civilization)! And while it is true that sloppy, confused writing often feeds the prevailing-bogus-ideology machine, I don’t think that the people who build their “ideas” by absorbing ideological mush would be thinking any better merely by being conduits for more skillful prose. If they could think better, they would reject the mush in the first place, right? I believe that clear thinking is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite to clear writing, not the product of clear writing (though writing can certainly be an incomparable, if sometimes limiting, tool for working out one’s ideas).

It is here that Truss goes perhaps most significantly astray. She actually seems to believe that conforming to punctuation rules will lead to cogent thinking: "Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking.” Would that it were so simple!

Meanwhile, in leading up to the above, she posits that “All our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places.” Funny — I am a meticulous punctuator myself, and yet I have occasionally found the goal of "absolute clarity" to my intended reader to have eluded me. Your thoughts must be of a different grade than mine, Lynne.

Truss is half-right much of the time. She’s right that punctuation is important to clear writing and good writing (but is anyone saying otherwise?). She’s wrong to imply that its misuse — and more general problems of bad writing, muddled expression, etc. — are a woe of our age in particular. People who think that things like television and the Internet are killing language need to be reminded that not so many generations ago (and correct me if I’m wrong here), the majority of people — even in affluent countries — were literally illiterate. To imply that there was once a golden age of expert, elegant writing among the population is therefore either elitist or ignorant. I’m fed up with that kind of “good old days” mythologizing. Moreover, the author herself debunks the "golden age" school right on page 39, at least in one specific context. She also acknowledges somewhere in her argument that TV used to be the scapegoat. If only she could follow through on these insights.

In fact, I found on my second reading that a number of the points I’m trying to make here seem to be acknowledged, in some form, somewhere in the book. The problem is that Truss can’t seem to maintain a judicious perspective. It’s almost as if, when she gets excited, she forgets her own best insights. Where was the editor, I wonder. Meeting with the marketing team?

Truss’s sloppy thinking, unscientific methods, and irrational logic make me distrust even the portions of this book that I enjoyed, and which I would have liked to praise as authoritative and interesting. Oh yes, there is an extensive bibliography; but slipshod college term papers have extensive bibliographies, too. Truss writes much, much better than the typical undergrad. But does she think better? And bearing all this in mind, I hesitate to credit, without further documentation, her claim that editors fail elementary punctuation quizzes on television. Likewise: "There is a rumour that in parts of the Civil Service workers have been pragmatically instructed to omit apostrophes because no one knows how to use them any more . . . . " A rumour, you say? Don’t wear yourself out with the basic research, now.

Further examples of the idiotic things I found in this celebrated book for literate people:

1) Truss wildly describes the current state of written English as characterized by "the disappearance of punctuation".

2) Similarly, she describes — out of whole cloth, unless I missed something — a "dangerous drift back to the scriptio continua of the ancient world, by which words are just hoicked together as ‘all one word" with no initial capitals or helpful punctuation". She really seems to believe it’s just a short step from trendy alloneword band names and function-driven dot-com run-togethers like "allmusic" to an entire written culture that looks like Finnegans Wake.

3) She blithely attributes the growing (if it really is growing) misuse of question marks after indirect questions to the youth-culture vocal inflection known as "upspeak". In other words, Truss seriously, and confidently, proposes that the mannerism of lilting one’s voice on the word "store" in the clause "So, I was at the store" [my example] causes one to write question marks after sentences like "I was wondering if it would rain today" [my example again]. To which I reply: "Like, excuse me?" (as an upspeaker might express it).

4) She proclaims that "[T]he naming of [pop group] Hear’Say in 2001 was . . . a significant milestone on the road to punctuation anarchy." And yet, idiosyncratic corporate/institutional punctuation (e.g. Lloyds TSB and HarperCollins) are to be accepted as givens, respected as de facto proper form, and generally put up with, according to Truss. Culture war, anyone? Granted, a blatantly gratuitous apostrophe is more bizarre than an elided apostrophe or word space . . . but if a pop group can’t adorn its name a little more bizarrely than a bank, what are things coming to?

5) Then there’s this:

"I have heard that people with double-barrelled names are simply unable to get the concept across these days, because so few people on the other end of a telephone know what a hyphen is." My wife and I have had hyphenated names for about twenty years. The average interlocutor has never processed that very well or been likely to write the correct punctuation mark when we say "hyphen". It is not any worse now than it was then, nor do I believe it would have been better forty years ago than it was twenty years ago.

If I may return to the theme of things lumped together that should be considered separately: It is true that complicated sentences with absent or faulty punctuation can cause puzzling, hilarious, or even fatal misunderstandings, as Truss amply demonstrates. Whereas a mispunctuated sign that reads "APPLE’S FOR SALE" causes only annoyance. But this distinction seems, at least at times, to be lost on Truss. And let us consider her bugbear, the aforementioned pop music group with the counterconventional use of punctuation in its band name. Dumb? Yes. Pernicious? No. Contagious? Undoubtedly, but only within a certain sphere of things that are frequently dumb anyway. National Book Award winners are not going to start misusing the apostrophe just because some band did. Teens don’t need a band to make them punctuate wrong. So why all this alarm and urgency? Whom are we trying to protect from this disease? Other pop groups? Snack foods? Banks?

Yes, I’d rather see everything punctuated correctly because I find it more aesthetic and it’s just as — well, almost as — easy to get it right. In print, there’s really no excuse for getting it wrong. But to leap from "APPLE’S FOR SALE" and "c u @ the movie’s" to the breakdown of written language is an example of — well — shoddy thinking. Yes, let’s continue to teach good writing. (And teach good thinking first, while we’re at it.) Make it a priority to give all citizens the tools to express themselves clearly in writing when they need or want to (and who, after all, would argue against this?). Not everyone profits from such efforts, but many can (and do). Get editors and proofreaders back on the job for stuff that’s going to press. Go door to door teaching use of the apostrophe to greengrocers, if you must. But don’t make mountains out of "molehill’s".

Finally, I draw your attention to the following (you might want to clip it out as a defense if someone is trying to coax you to read the book):

"Despite all the opportunities to ‘interact’, we read material from the internet (or CD-roms [sic!], or whatever) entirely passively because all the interesting associative thinking has already been done on our behalf [she’s talking about links, I believe, judging from the larger context from which I’m excerpting] . Electronic media are intrinsically ephemeral, are open to perpetual revision, and work quite strenuously against any sort of historical perception. The opposite of edited, the material on the internet is unmediated, except by the technology itself. And having no price, it has questionable value."

Wow! It’s hard to know where to begin with a series of patently absurd generalizations like that. Actually, it makes me sort of regret I ever began with the book. I can’t believe Truss is genuinely unaware of such things as online editors and moderators; or that she seriously thinks no one does any first-order associative thinking in his or her very own brain while using an electronic interface, or that the entire Web is devoid of any discourse that offers "historical perception" . . . or that she is really so infantile or decadent as to regard anything that is free as being of dubious value. No, I don’t think she could possibly be this stupid. So why is she wasting our time with such stupid statements? Best-Seller, that’s why.

The author would like to dismiss her detractors as a bunch of apathetics who tell her to "Get a life!" instead of promoting correct punctuation. Well, I’m not telling her to "Get a life!"; what I’m telling her is closer to the opposite of that. For whereas "Get a life!" implies that the subject matter which fascinates Truss is not worthy of anyone’s time and energy, my opinion is that Truss’s treatment fails to do a worthwhile subject justice — not because it’s brief, witty, and readable, but because it’s sloppy, unfocused, and at times completely crackpot. I don’t say "Get a life!"; I say that if you’re going to critique, do it like a professional, not an amateur. Don’t just give us a garbled stream of impressionistic truisms. Do some real research. Make some substantive comparisons. Who knows — maybe you’ll learn something worth writing about.

–guest review by Jonathan Caws-Elwitt

More Jonathan writing can be found here

If you’d like to read yet more criticism of this book — by a much more eminent writer — try Louis Menand’s piece.

I think Menand’s advantage over me is that he is smart enough to not take Truss too seriously — perhaps in part because he picked up on how shaky her own grasp of punctuation is, which I did not. (If I had, I might not have bothered to write about her book at all.) Where I treat her book like a loud, clattering noise whose presence warrants a detailed, earnest response, he gives the impression of completely and successfully dismissing her without even really needing to lift his attention from the other article he’s trying to write (which seems, through typesetter oversight, to have been printed in the same column as the one about Truss). This poise I greatly admire. I imagine Menand suave, probably cradling a glass of red wine in his hand. (I must remember to cradle red wine when next I review a book.)

— jc-e

In the olden days of the Bookbridge, the bookstore where my husband still works (but which has moved many times), there was a cozy, cramped office in the back where I used to wait for Jonathan’s shift to end if I had come to pick him up. I have a very vivid memory of reading the first chapter of this book in that office, laughing uncontrollably even though I was alone and out of earshot of anyone. I still think that as a stand-alone essay, it’s the funniest piece of writing I’ve ever read.

“Tragically Defunct: Product Failure” is about the endless parade of new consumer products that appear and then vanish. You probably have heard some of these stories before: R.J. Reynolds’ smokeless cigarette, Premier; the Edsel; Heublein’s Wine & Dine dinners (with a bottle of cooking wine that people thought was for drinking). What makes Steinberg’s essay so hilarious is the combination of his strengths. His research is thorough, resulting in many stories that you haven’t heard before, and in details that flesh out the familiar ones so that they come to life instead of feeling like hand-me-downs. He uses structure beautifully, bookending a visit to the New Products Showcase and Learning Center (a “museum” of failed products) with personal anecdotes about finding an old bottle of 7-Up and regretting a lost Cracker Jack toy. Steinberg excels at tying together autobiographical details, facts in the story he’s reporting, and more general philosophical musings–hard to pull off smoothly. He feels that objects have a personality (as do I), and he manages to communicate that personality in a few well-chosen words (like describing Hostess Sno balls “hunched there in the store”). Finally, he writes beautifully–a master of clarity and le mot juste, with a distinctive voice.

Here are some bits I find particularly funny. On Ronson’s attempt to sell a butane-fueled “candle”:

If only a way could be found to get people to burn their lighters continuously, for hours at at time. Think of the butane they’d use.

What would you call a lighter that needed to be lit for long stretches? Of course–a candle.

You have to admire such yearning, wistful greed–it’s as if a margarine company started dipping their product in chocolate and selling it in the freezer section along with Eskimo Pies and Popsicles.

On failed food products:

…Reddi Whip, forgetting how closely its name was linked to fake whipped cream, introduced Reddi Bacon–precooked bacon in a foil pouch to be dropped into the toaster. But the two products did not sit well together on the plate of the mind, and consumers rejected the newer one. Also, fat from the packet dripped into the toaster and caught fire, a common problem for failed toaster products. The Electric French Fry, a board of fries popped into the toaster, then broken apart for eating, did the same thing. Downyflake Toaster Eggs didn’t burn. They were just disgusting.

I note now that Steinberg mentions Nicholson Baker, whom I hadn’t heard of when I first read this essay. Next-best chapter is on the National Spelling Bee, which he nails as a horrible ritual symbolic of mass education: “Not only does just one child out of 9,000,000 win, but the 8,999,999 losers lose in a public and humiliating fashion.” I thought of this essay a lot when I saw the (wonderful) movie Spellbound. Other chapters discuss the conquest of Everest, perpetual motion machines, people who succeed too young, and much more. It’s consistently entertaining and frequently thought-provoking, even profound. Just a great, great book, and one that that I revisit with fresh pleasure and new insights each time.

DeJong is a great children’s writer (The Wheel on the School and Along Came a Dog are terrific) who can turn very simple situations into understated gems. I usually like Anita Lobel’s illustrations very much. But alas, this book is somewhat less than the sum of its parts. The three puppies (Smith, Brown, & Jones) are cute in both the pictures and the descriptions. But the story of Jon and Vestri’s summer vacation with Grandma and Grandpa, during which they take home the three puppies, isn’t particularly memorable.