Your Humble Blogger had, if you’ll recall, quite enjoyed Eats, Shoots and Leaves, so despite the nasty reviews, when Lynne Truss’s’s most recent showed up on the New Book Shelf, home it came. Reading it was not as enjoyable an experience. Not that it was awful, or at least not uniformly awful. There were some lovely bits, such as Ms. Truss declaring that what really bothered her about people on the train using their mobile phones was their dreary honesty. “I’m on the train”, they invariably state. “Oh, yes, the reception on the beach is fantastic” would be far more entertaining.
Still, just as E,S&L was most entertaining when she self-mockingly described her over-the-top reaction to what everybody knows are simple and meaningless mistakes and variances, Talk to the Hand is most entertaining when she is being, well, entertaining. For the most part, though, she’s just whining. Oh, oh, oh, people are awful, aren’t they, and don’t you just hate them? No, actually, I don’t.
The subtitle of the book is The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or, Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door, and she really does seem to want to stay home and avoid dealing with, you know, people. Now, Ms. Truss does live in another country, and she does say that she thinks things are very different in the US, despite our own self-stereotyping as the Rudest People Anywhere, but honestly, when was the last time you heard anybody tell anybody else to Fuck Off? I know, I’m living in a small town, and I saw somebody give a buddy the finger here on Main Street not two weeks ago, but really, are people that rude?
And Ms. Truss herself is, or rather portrays herself as being, terribly rude herself. She describes walking into a waiting room (at a doctor’s or some such) and switching off the stereo, flabbergasted that the people who work there actually want to listen to it. You know, lady, people are different one to another, and if that makes your world annoying and tedious instead of interesting and fun, then, yes, do Fuck Off home and bar the door. If there are a hundred people on your train, and only one of them is swearing, you can be upset about the swearing, sure, but if you are going to extrapolate to say that People are Like That, then you have to explain the ninety-nine people that for some inexplicable reason are not telling Ms. Truss to Fuck Off.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.