BOOK OF THE DAY: The Art of ConversationBy Catherine Blyth John Murray 291pp, £12.99
THE OPENING pages of Catherine Blyth's analysis of talk is like being cornered by a bore at a dinner party, explaining in excruciating detail about how spontaneity breathes humour into conversation and how the perils of modern life are supposedly killing it.
"Psychologists fear that families are talking to each other less than ever and there is plenty of evidence to support this," she writes.
Talk about stating the obvious. With the internet and television, it's true folk don't natter like they used to. Talk radio aside, of course.
If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck - "Isolation magnifies disconnect and disenchantment," Blyth muses. If the author was seated next to me at a dinner party, and I'd known she was going to be so pedantic, I'd have secretly switched the place settings.
But Blyth has her moments, too, after doing an admirable amount of legwork, both in the library and outside of it, with literary and philosophical citations from Jean-Paul Sartre to GK Chesterton, plus anecdotes from Elizabeth I and words of wisdom from Mel Brooks.
A stranger, Marge Simpson sang, is just a friend you just haven't met. A man chants on a train; Blyth is worried by his bottles of fluid, but was "paranoid and ashamed" to judge him, so she spoke with him for an hour about the Koran. How magnanimous of her.
Hell, according to Blyth, is not other people, it is six billion people on a planet who are no longer talking face-to-face. But we communicate more often and randomly than ever. And that's not including sessions with therapists. In fact, we probably ought to shut up.
She quotes John Steinbeck, who once said, "We are lonesome animals. We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome." Well, that's human beings for you. Always looking to connect. Though Blyth rightly believes great conversationalists listen more than talk.
Laurence Olivier wrote of Arthur Miller to Noel Coward from the set of The Prince and the Showgirl: "Arthur talks a great deal better than he listens, but I never found his talk very entertaining." I suspect that Olivier, like the rest of us, had the very same problem.
Blyth seriously oversteps the mark when she says "attention deficit disorder, formerly known as annoying brat syndrome, is a clumsy term for a pervasive social blight: bad listening." Tongue-in-cheek as this is, it's a far more complicated condition than that.
Silence is also a most effective tool, she says. Sure, as long as it's not a weapon to force a person into rambling and too many personal revelations. Pregnant pauses have their place. Yes, but . . . not to hold some poor sod hostage to an interminably long anecdote.
The chapter on boredom should have been the most delicious. Unfortunately, it did to this reader exactly what it said in the title. Blyth says boredom is theft: "Take that lady who wouldn't dream of picking your pockets, yet thinks nothing of squandering your time."
She adds: "My theory is bores got their names because they bore a hole in conversation out of which enthusiasm rapidly drains."
"My theory" includes laboured jokes and odd statements like boredom is not a "timeless human dilemma" but "an evolving concept".
In my view, the worst bores are self-important, over-familiar or just plain lazy. The ubiquitous dinner party example: "So . . . tell me about yourself." Happily, the silent bore allows you to become a bore too by allowing you to practise your do-ray-me-me-me.
The Art of Conversationis scholarly, methodical and beautifully produced, but it is relentlessly repetitive and over-written.
Blyth advises being kind to a thundering bore if you meet one because, she says without any hint of irony, "One day, it could be you."
• Quentin Fottrell is Irish correspondent for Dow Jones Newswires, dishes out advice on his website WorldWeary.com and is radio critic forThe Irish Times . His first book,Love In A Damp Climate: The Dating Game . . . Irish-Style , is published by Currach Press