Book review: 'The Finger' by Angus Trumble

THE FINGER

A Handbook

By Angus Trumble

Farrar Straus Giroux

300 pp. $28

What is more familiar than one's own fingers, and what is more apt to be taken for granted? They are always there, those modest, undemanding servants, at our beck and call; and except when something has gone wrong -- a scratch, a sprain -- they call little attention to themselves. Indeed, they seem always to be pointing at something other, always directing our attention elsewhere.

But fingers are in their own right quite fascinating. If you don't believe me, Angus Trumble's "The Finger" is here to convince you. An art historian and curator, Trumble has already shown in his previous book, "A Brief History of the Smile," his ability to build an enjoyably idiosyncratic miscellany of facts and observations around a deeply ordinary but habitually neglected element of human life.

"The Finger" moves beyond the oral fixations of "The Smile" and boldly into the digital realm. We frequently identify people by their smiles and the rest of their faces, but hands, too, are highly individual and highly expressive. We forget how much communication takes place through our hands, both through written language (you are, right now, reading what my fingers tapped out) and through signs and gestures. The thumbs-up, the V of "peace," the raised "just hold on one minute" index finger, the wave of greeting or goodbye, and of course the expression of raw hostility and contempt known simply as "the finger" -- all these are part of your repertoire and mine. And they are just the rudiments: Fingers are capable of learning and articulating entire languages, of which the sign language used by the deaf is only the most familiar example. As Trumble writes, human beings have always been prepared to let their fingers do the talking:

"There have always been sign languages for the benefit of the deaf and mute, but sometimes there have been ritual bans on speech -- temporary or even occasionally permanent -- that made species of gesture not only necessary but indispensable. Not all of them were monastic in nature; married Armenian women in the Caucasus were prevented by convention from speaking to their husbands' male relatives, and solved the problem by adopting a convenient language of gesture." In 10th-century Cluny, meanwhile, sign language defeated the purpose of the vow of silence: "It soon emerged that some monks using the in-house sign language were as chatty, garrulous, and prone to gossip as they would have been if they were allowed to speak."

As an art historian, Trumble is especially intrigued by fingers as objects of beauty, including the perpetual quest for the fabled and elusive "filbert nail," and by their depiction in art. He devotes an entire chapter to gloves and another to nail polish. The latter includes several quite entertaining, if also slightly disturbing, pages detailing a certain "lively exchange of letters to the editor of The [London] Times in August 1937," set off by one letter-writer's contention that the use of nail polish had an inextricably racial element, the desire to "conceal the traces of black blood that otherwise would be discernible there."

If fingers can be works of art in themselves -- a thought encouraged by a cosmetics industry whose magnitude and influence, as Trumble points out, have expanded exponentially in recent decades -- they are all the more interesting when they appear in works of art. The most famous and obvious example, perhaps, would be the fingertip touch, at once intimate and distant, that unites Adam and God on Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. More unexpected and intriguing, though, is Trumble's meditation on the "carefully drawn fingers" in Picasso's Guernica:

"In all the principal figures . . . the forms of their carefully sexualized bodies, with armpits and nipples and veins and toenails, are distorted almost to the fullest extent possible without losing track of what they are doing. But look at all those hands and stubby fingers, at least twelve sets. With grim determination, Picasso shows us the limpness of a dead baby's fingers against the horrifying eloquence of the mother's free hand, the index finger somehow quietly curling toward the thumb in the manner one occasionally sees in a person overcome by hysteria -- creating in the process an almost perversely correct enumeration of each set of digits."

Not all of Trumble's writing rises to this level; some of the detailed anatomical discussions, for instance, come across as rather dry. And the book seems to simply run out of steam and stop, rather than building to a satisfying conclusion. But if these are the book's flaws, they can be counted on the fingers of one hand, with some to spare. On the whole, "The Finger" is a deft, enjoyable and often provocative investigation into some overlooked and interrelated aspects of human experience.

Troy Jollimore is the author of "Tom Thomson in Purgatory," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry for 2006.