DISCOVERIES

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Conversation

A History of a Declining Art

Stephen Miller

Yale: 328 pp., $27.50

IN this marvelously clear and vigorous exploration of the history of conversation, Stephen Miller writes that 18th century England, with its coffeehouses and clubs, was the heyday of the art. Author Henry Fielding described it as the “reciprocal Interchange of Ideas.” By century’s end, such sociability gave way to taciturnity and the idea that conversation was somehow not as “manly” as solitude. It didn’t flourish in America, where the cult of the solitary hero and the transcendentalists’ natural man (never a big talker) created a distrust of rational discourse, a fear of being manipulated or influenced, he writes.

Now e-mail and other “conversation avoidance devices,” a popular culture that is “hostile to conversation,” excessive politeness and excessive expression, and the rise of talk shows (“ersatz conversation”) all indicate a rather silent, even lonely future. Too bad, Miller says, since conversation is one of the finest ways to form the ties of friendship. Without it, there is solitude, which leads to brooding, which leads, he warns, to fanaticism. Just what we don’t need.

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An Infinity of Little Hours

Five Young Men and Their Trial of Faith in the Western World’s Most Austere Monastic Order

Nancy Klein Maguire

Public Affairs: 258 pp., $26

“CARTUSIA nunquam reformata quia nunquam deformata.” Loosely translated: Nothing has needed reforming in the Carthusian Order of monks since its 11th century founding because nothing is deformed. To five men joining the order in England, in 1960, it seems that they are entering not just a monastery but a medieval way of life. The Carthusians are the “most rigorous monastic regime in the Western world,” the “most contemplative,” Nancy Klein Maguire writes in “An Infinity of Little Hours.”

Maguire, whose marriage to an ex-Carthusian gives her rare access, reconstructs the men’s paths through five years in training. What sets Carthusians apart is their emphasis on solitude and individual relationships to God. Postulants live alone in cells, their one meal a day left by silent monks. They wear hair shirts, eat no meat, wake several times each night to pray and avoid all eye contact. They fast on Fridays and “take the discipline,” which means scourging oneself with a knotted rope.

Only 10% become monks; to Maguire’s credit, she avoids the more competitive, reality-show aspects of the challenge, focusing instead on the spiritual process. Some cannot bear the cold. Others languish from the loneliness and feel acutely that their life is wasting away.

Still it is fascinating to enter, if only for a few hours, into this way of life, where extreme devotion forms at least a bit of a bulwark against humanity’s digressions.

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Black Elk in Paris

A Novel

Kate Horsley

Trumpeter: 212 pp., $19.95

IN Kate Horsley’s new novel, physician Philippe Normand is hardly aware of the spiritual sickness around him in the heady late 1880s. His colleague, Jean-Martin Charcot (based on the real, pre-Freudian neurologist), routinely removes women’s ovaries to cure hysteria; Philippe’s close friend, Madou, a free-spirited woman, is stifled by a dysfunctional family and society’s stringent rules.

The culture’s suffocating nature becomes painfully clear to those who meet Black Elk, a Lakota medicine man they call Choice who has been left behind in Europe by Buffalo Bill Cody’s traveling Wild West show. Choice becomes ill with homesickness. Philippe takes the healer with him on his rounds. When Madou falls in love with Choice, her parents have her committed to an insane asylum.

Long after Choice has gone home to America, Philippe and Madou see him clearly in their dreams. Horsley is a supremely stylish writer, a quality that can distract, as it does in real life, from character. But “Black Elk in Paris” combines big ideas with a bit of history. In its own lighthearted way, it raises an unavoidable question: Where exactly did humanity go wrong?