A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation
By Daniel Menaker
Grand Central, 230 pages
The differences between historical and modern conversations are differences of degree and not type. For example, here is the 17th-century French writer La Rochefoucauld on a particular sort of conversational nuisance that irked him:
One of the reasons why so few people are to be found who seem sensible and pleasant in conversation is that almost everybody is thinking about what he wants to say himself rather than about answering clearly what is being said to him.
This type of gaucherie existed then and exists now. But as to the degree of its existence—if it was prevalent in La Rochefoucald’s day, it is simply infestant in ours. And why wouldn’t it be, when the conversations and conversationalists that saturate modern senses are so often deficient in precisely the manner of Le Rochefoucauld’s colloquial bête noire. It’s so simple to peg the perps that it’s almost not worth it: the screamers who inhabit the talk-radio world; the news-of-the-day pundit-bloviators; programs such as The View and 129 others on which the guests try only to push a product, usually themselves; political types who speak in weirdly programmatic vapidities; and the bronzed and buffed people-characters of reality television, whose interactions tend toward the paroxysmal.
This is communication as pollution. And as it bludgeons the public, it actively reinforces the bad habits it relays—which is to say that the many millions who absorb hours upon hours of such impoverished conversation are liable if not likely to themselves converse in a similarly bankrupt manner.
It seems reasonable, then, to conclude that conversation is devolving. Stephen Miller’s substantial 2006 book, Conversation, for instance, was subtitled “A History of a Declining Art.” Miller dived into the research and emerged pessimistic; in his book’s last sentence, he writes that in America, “the prospects for conversation are not good.”
Daniel Menaker is not so glum. In fact, his new book about conversation, A Good Talk, is mostly—and astonishingly, given conversation’s enemies ascendant—quite the jaunty read. It’s jaunty enough to intermittently provoke real, audible, voluminous laughter. Guffaw-type stuff, I mean.
Menaker—a longtime editor both at the New Yorker and Random House, a skilled novelist, essayist, and humorist—has written a book “about the story and shapes and skills of conversation,” and also about conversation “as a kind of artifact—a human art of great importance produced by all people everywhere.” A Good Talk is to be a sort of celebration of conversation and not a lamentation over the hospital bed.
Menaker begins by defining his subject. A “real conversation,” he writes, requires “thoughts and ideas and reactions that are not simply reflexive and that have no immediate practical use.” Otherwise, “we call it trigonometry class or a conference call or This Old House,” instances of communication with reasonably defined angles, trajectories, and terminuses.
Conversation, by contrast, is freewheeling (which can engender one of its most delightful pleasures: discovery), although elements of pragmatism are allowed to wiggle their way in so long as they remain recessive to the spontaneous allele. Etiquette and respectfulness are important, as is trotting tenderly about certain topics, such as politics and religion. But a conversation’s “most important apparent ingredient—one produced by curiosity, reverie, humor, and playfully associational thinking—is aimlessness, in that word’s most neutral definition.”
Menaker starts with some required history, and he’s not too thrilled about it:
Who is to say that because James Boswell set down in no doubt sanitized writing many of Samuel Johnson’s pronouncements and we happen to know about them, they are of greater conversational originality or interest or insight than what two old Maori friends said to each other in the thirteenth century while fishing off the coast near what is now Auckland? Not me.
But because the “Western canon insists on being fired,” Menaker dutifully if speedily moves through the historical cast, from Socrates, with whom the annals of Western conversation generally begin, to Cicero, whose b.c.e.-era rules of polite conversation are basically the same as our own, to Johnson, and then to Hume, who wrote much about conversation and who furnishes Menaker with a golden quote that is exhumed several times throughout A Good Talk: “Nothing carries a man through the world like a true genuine natural impudence.” Any dialogue is usually improved by a dash of impudence.
Then on to chapters 3 and 4, in which Menaker transcribes a real, overtly recorded 90-minute conversation he had over a sushi lunch with a young female writer he knows only faintly. Menaker’s authorial voice occasionally breaks out of the transcript to comment on the preceding pages—“In this section of the conversation, what I’ve termed the Survey continues and expands”?.?.?.? “A more interesting commonality here emerges from something unsaid rather than said”?.?.?.?“A pause here to discuss name dropping”—before returning to the actual nigiri proceedings. It’s an instructive portrait of the workings of a conversation.
Chapter 5—“FAQS (Frequently Arising Quandaries)”—earns the “most fun” designation, principally because it deals with those conversational quandaries, such as being seated at a dinner party next to the event’s most boring guest, that are awful to endure but joyful to read about, especially when relayed by as witty a recounter as Menaker. We are also here treated to some lively stories illustrating the conversational foibles and predicaments under discussion, and some unique methods for avoiding and extricating oneself from them.
Smooth and enjoyable sailing. But then comes the squall. “After Words,” Menaker’s last chapter, begins well enough, with a discussion of oxytocin (the so-called cuddle hormone) and how a good chat is one way to release it and treat ourselves and our interlocutors to salubrious neurochemical highs. Menaker might have turned the corner right here, sharply, and written about other ways in which conversation can be healthful. But he drags on with the science lesson. We learn, inter alia, about oxytocin’s magical ability upon injection into the cerebrospinal fluid of a male rat to produce an instant rodential erection—a fine fact that nonetheless seems rather off–topic. For the first time, A Good Talk starts to feel plodding.
Things gradually get moving, but they don’t get better. “Like capitalism,” Menaker writes, “technology tends to become a sort of Being, a blind, thoughtless entity that has its own way of taking over our lives, like cancer in an individual person’s body.” He continues: “We cannot go on serving these demons of our own devising.” And he is not nearly done:
If we don’t rein in these marvels-turned-menaces, and if we don’t manage to make communal and cooperative motives and sustainable goals supersede the impossible grails of endless growth and ever greater profits, and if we don’t tear down or at least sequester the empty, virtual Babel that our society threatens to become, we’re finished.
Whoa, what happened to jaunty? The imprecision of these and subsequent floppy sentences is disconcerting, but more so is the manner in which Menaker has chosen to conclude his book about conversation by dominating the conversation in precisely the manner he advises against. For the preceding pages, A Good Talk has been a saunter, its author bouncing impudently and easily from point to point, in no particular order and with no apparent, particular goal in mind. It has been, in fact, a conversation with the reader. But in the last chapter, Menaker morphs from the dinner party’s sparkle to its bore (“Have you heard about oxytocin?”) to its harrumpher, who after a few too many glasses of Burgundy gets going on politics, religion, economics, and generalized doom and does so in a thoughtless (in all senses of the word) manner. How off-putting.
Menaker is a gifted and funny writer; he is far less gifted as a pundit and social theorist. It is a shame that this book, so much of which is a really raucous read, wraps up by ignoring its own advice to avoid being pedantic or preachy or earnest, to eschew subjects like politics and religion, and to not suddenly change the topic or tone of discussion in midstream. As they occasionally do, A Good Talk ends on a bad note.
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