Book Review: ‘Talk,’ by Alison Wood Brooks

She also warns about “candidate answers,” a kind of leading the witness, in which one asks an open-ended question only to narrow it down in anticipation. (As in: Why are you reading a book about how to improve your conversations? Do you think you have room to grow, or are you just hoping to feel superior?) I realized that I curtail my questions this way all the time; leaving them open has actually expanded the answers I receive.

Brooks is a companionable writer, and she’s alive to the absurdity inherent in her project. Talk is messy, and good talk messier still; templates, instructions and guardrails are generally self-defeating. Kant, she notes, hosted dinners that adhered to a strict script: Guests spoke during the first course of headlines and the weather before proceeding, with their entrees, to politics and the sciences. Dessert came with “jesting.” Games, beer and music were forbidden; lulls were unpardonable. Though Brooks lauds the philosopher’s ambition, she prefers her conversations faster and looser — something, she says, like Arlie Hochschild’s description of “the jazz of human exchange.”

But I couldn’t hear the jazz in “Talk”’s pages of diagrams and graphs, among them a “conversational compass,” a “topic pyramid” and a “chart of emotions.” Brooks’s rigid, evidence-based approach means that she must frequently write things that I suspect she would find obvious or trite in conversation, such as, “It’s not just about choosing topics, but also deciding what to say about them.” By the time I read that talking like a rude cop at a traffic stop “is likely to make your friends, your romantic partner, your mom and everyone else uncomfortable in less charged circumstances, too,” I was about ready to take a vow of silence.

Parts of “Talk” feel designed not to help humans communicate but to train A.I. This is especially evident in the section on levity, which advises “livening up your texts by sending Onion headlines to your friends” and imitating the outsize reactions of “Seinfeld” characters.

Is this what it feels like to be optimized? I don’t know why I say half the things I say, and I often want my conversations to roam elsewhere, but to make “spreadsheets filled with promising topics to raise with strangers,” as some of Brooks’s students do, would make me feel even less human than I already do.