Just one of oh-so-many perfect exchanges of dialogue from easily the best year-2008 novel to have crossed my desk to date:
“We’re on the same side here.”
“You know what? … The very fact that you think it’s necessary to reassure me of that tells me we’re not.”
—Richard Price, Lush Life (p397, ARC)
Man, ain’t that the truth?
Now, here’s a novel idea: apologizing, in person.
Special this week to BBC online’s “60 Seconds to Change the World” column, and inspired by real-life U.K. bank managers prostrating themselves before the House of Commons’s Treasury Committee, American author Tom Perrotta has audaciously upped the ante by suggesting that people saying sorry face to face would be good for society.
Scandalous, I know. But Perrotta inadvertently goes a long way towards semi-vindicating my disdain of cell phones, email, and email-equipped cell phones. Allow me to explain.
In 1912, “American culture was set up to be a more individualist culture and the British culture was more about the gentlemanly behaviour,” says Queensland University of Technology’s David Savage, interviewed by the BBC about his study of lifeboat queues during the sinking of the Titanic. The Australian behavioral economist argues that, with the majority of women and children safely placed in the boats, American men generally started pushing their way into the remaining spots while their male British counterparts politely stood by. And died.
Of course, Titanic captain Edward John Smith is famously reported to have said, “Be British, boys, be British,” as he went down with his ship.
Posted verbatim and without editorial comment, a paragraph from Elliott Chaze’s noir crime story Black Wings Has My Angel (1953):
“But about the gentleman thing.” She waved her glass. “I want to make it plain as the nose on your face. I can stand anything in the book but gentlemen. Because I’ve spent a lot of time, too much time with them, and I know why gentlemen are what they are…
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