The dead are as self-centered as the living the mind is an inexhaustible and ingenious excuse-generator. And like Proust (but unlike most advice columnists), Martin is interested less in what should be true than what is true. Here is an insight worthy of Proust - in prose too clear and stern to wave away as so much psychological nuance-savoring. Miss Manners’ knowledge of human emotions tells her that he would have wanted you to be too overcome with grief to be capable of enjoying anything, and she would have wanted national mourning.” Or so one would assume from hearing surviving friend and relations saying things like ‘He would have wanted me to go out and enjoy myself on a day like this,’ ‘She would have preferred that I go to the football game instead of being glum at her funeral service’ and ‘He would have told us to go ahead with our festival and not cancel it on his account.’ “It’s wonderful how death transforms the spirit, so that everyone who is deceased becomes a self-effacing promoter of the comfort of the living. Toward the end of the book (appropriately), Martin takes on that hardiest and least amenable-to-niceties of subjects: death. Miss Manners believes… As Miss Manners recalls… This not only provides Martin’s prose with its acerbic bounce it also allows her to create an identity that stands some distance from her - a many-limbed superhero costume into which she and the reader can squeeze together, vanquishing the foes of consideration and civility. Of course you shouldn’t specify No children on an invitation! Of course thank you notes should be written before the gift-wrap is thrown away! How could anyone - least of all me - ever have thought otherwise?Ī stylistic quirk of Martin’s books is that she writes about Miss Manners in the third person. I could hardly say no, but I wanted to ), but from the side of the elegant repository of wisdom ( Gentle Reader… Not just good taste, but human decency (not to mention good sense) requires that you allow people on your premises to use your bathroom ). I experience her books not from the side of the muddled questioner ( Dear Miss Manners… House painters, window installers, roofers and the like have asked to use my bathroom. No one has ever accused me of being a paragon of etiquette, but I feel, when I read Miss Manners, as if I know just what every situation calls for. Miss Manners (whose own good manners would never permit her to make such a comparison) achieves something similar. When I read Tolstoy I feel peculiarly enlisted in the project of describing life - it feels as if my latent powers of observation have been liberated by his prose and now he and I will race around the countryside together, seeing into the soul of every laborer and woodland creature we pass. Alice Munro finds a couple of half-dead AA batteries in the back of my mental drawer of insights, attaches them to an already blazing klieg light - and somehow the feeling, as a reader, is of being an equal partner in illumination. Great writers impress you with your intelligence. Good writers (Don DeLillo, Richard Powers) impress you with their intelligence. And not understood merely as I am (impatient, exhausted, distracted by that one last text I need to send), but understood as I would like to be. What her writing offers is not the workaday satisfaction of a reference book ( So that ’s where Belgium is ) - it is, rather, a distilled version of the pleasure on offer in Kafka or Dickens or Woolf. At the end of an enervating, back-to-back-birthday-party weekend, I refresh myself with a dash of Martin’s counter-stereotypically warm and tolerant writing about children (“If it is wrong to make cracks about the elderly, and an aging population is working hard on that, then it should be wrong make cracks about the young.”) Fighting off yet another cold ( It’s not Covid, I swear! ), I wrap myself in the wry sympathy of her chapter on illness (“It is of surprisingly little comfort to be told that one’s sickness is considered by others to be either more serious or more trivial than one has oneself decided that it is.”) In the almost twenty years I’ve owned it, Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior - an 800-plus page brick of good sense - has rarely rested on the shelf. Many a novelist, toiling away at his own unruly orchard of human predicaments, would do well to peer over the fence. Her prose is clear and funny and no more acidic than necessary. Her obsessions are neither trivial nor queasily intimate. Only Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners, seems to have mastered the fragile chemistry. But the advice column’s landscaping tends to be a mess: the soil is either inhospitably arid (quotes from ancient stoics, weedy strands of college ethics) or disastrously soupy (fervid self-involvement, ransom-letter-esque capitalization). The advice column and the novel should be happy neighbors, surrounded by their common flora - anguish, confession, the occasional bloom of wisdom.
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