Henry Alford's modern guide to manners

WOULD IT KILL YOU TO STOP DOING THAT?: A Modern Guide to Manners, by Henry Alford. Twelve, 242 pp., $24.99.

'There are times in life when you notice the world's ills, and sigh in contemplative resignation; and there are times when you notice the world's ills, and grab a pair of rubber gloves and a bottle of Windex." So Henry Alford, the one-time Spy magazine writer, now a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and The New York Times, announces his mission in "Would It Kill You to Stop Doing That?: A Modern Guide to Manners." While Alford's Windex job on modern manners is not systematic or thorough, the chitchat he makes while he scrubs is entertaining.

Alford defines manners as a matter of treating one another well, and distinguishes it from its more serious colleague, ethics, and its subgenres, etiquette and protocol. He describes life as a cosmic Wikipedia, where each of us through our actions is redefining and expanding the categories to which we belong. Unfortunately, I must reveal that Alford is redefining the term "etiquette writer" as a "person who really enjoys a weird restaurant game called 'Touch the Waiter.'" Yes, he does, and rules and scoring are described in detail.

The book alternates between these idiosyncratic digressions -- there are chapters on visiting Japan, trading seedlings on veggietrader.com, giving free tours of New York to foreign visitors -- and actual commentary on modern manners. One of the more efficacious sections offers a list of the responses Alford received when he asked friends for their pet peeves. When someone replies to your phone call with an email or a text message, when someone hits "reply to all" on a group email to say something unnecessary, when someone you see all the time fails to offer "PGR" (Perfunctory Gestural Recognition) with at least a pucker of the lips -- these I could relate to. And I know I will make use of his pointers on approaching others at parties without seeming to be making a pass at them.

While the book's flow is a little bumpy, the reader's way is smoothed throughout by consistently fun writing. Alford on the morning bowing ritual in Japanese department stores: "Seldom have I felt more honored. As you walk down a couple hundred feet of cosmetics counters at an old-guard store like Mitsukoshi, your movement sets off a ripple of appreciation that starts directly in front of you, then shimmers briefly over the Lancôme counter prior to wafting up to the ceiling and bursting in a cirrocumulus pillow of good tidings." Alford on why you should steer clear of someone you know when you see him in a drugstore: "He may be buying condoms or hemorrhoidal salves, or any of a host of unguents meant to bring relief or pleasure to the body's carapaces and byways."

Returning later in the book to the question of what manners truly are, Alford uses child-development theory to come to a revised conclusion. "Maybe good manners are imagination." No wonder he turned out to be such an expert.