Narcissus Leaves the Pool: Familiar Essays

Rating:
Summary: Readers of the American Scholar yearn for Epstein.
Review: A formal indictment should be brought against the editorial board of the American Scholar for firing Joseph Epstein as editor.

This wonderful and intelligent collection reminds us of how much he is missed.

Rating:
Summary: Not Going Gently
Review: Epstein divides his essays into the literary and familiar. The former examine lives of writers and the lives of their books, while the latter are more personal and introspective along the lines of autobiography.

The recurrent theme in this latest crop is aging and death and I'm unclear on whether Epstein has decided to go gently. In one, he mourns the bodily changes that accompany maturity, in another the discomfort, physical and otherwise, associated with a heart bypass operation. We see him scan the obituary pages and sadly note the passing of friends. Perhaps if I were closer to Epstein's age, I would find these reflections less morbid. As things are, I doubt I can reach his degree of understanding in such matters, or do them justice, without having walked in his well-worn shoes.

There's a brief look at Epstein's friendship with Albert Goldman, who achieved a small bit of fame for his biographies of Elvis and John Lennon. Goldman emerges as a sad type, a hippie liberal still trying to be hip at an age when that word has no meaning. By contrast, Edward Shils, in a moving tribute, is shown to be a man devoted to the fundamental.

In his chatty way, Epstein treats us to more essays about lengthy books, name dropping, name-pronouncing, and napping. I'm especially fond of the last one, "The Art of the Nap." Albert Jay Nock wrote an essay called "The Art of Snoring," which suggested that the world's problems were usually caused by busy people who could not mind their own busy-ness. His prescription: more naps.

Is Epstein still at the top of his game? I'd say so.

Rating:
Summary: (Former) readers of the American Scholar yearn for Epstein.
Review: I couldn't agree more with the reviewer from Texas, so let me repeat the Texan: a formal indictment should be brought against Phi Beta Kappa for firing Joseph Epstein. The end of the American Scholar as we knew it was the first publishing loss of my young life; now I fully appreciate how lifetime 'New Yorker 'readers felt when William Shawn was dismissed. Anyway, I'm supposed to stick to the book. These essays, originally American Scholar columns, are a great pleasure. Thank you, Mr. Epstein.

Rating:
Summary: Essayist Charms Again
Review: Joseph Epstein is out of step with the times; so much the worse for the times. But you wouldn't expect one of our best essayists to share the hyperkinetic spirit of our quick-cut, crisis-of-the-week, information overload age, malnourished as it is on fast food and fast thought. Epstein's readers, used to his erudite and soothing literary voice, will conclude that he's, square peg or no, comfortable in the world. Epstein is a clear, deliberate thinker and graceful writer who won't be rushed. He knows his way around an idea, an anecdote, a philosophical question. He creates intimacy, interest, and assent without being the least polemical or didactic (see above re one of our best essayists), and demonstrates that as well as being useful, intelligence can also be a sheer joy. Narcissus Leaves the Pool -- the sixth essay collection of Epstein's 13 books - will only add to his reputation. The 16 pieces here repay the serious and the playful mind (if the same mind, so much the better). In his surefooted style -- serious but not solemn, humorous but never trivial, deep but always accessible. Epstein ponders what distinguishes a point of view from a grab-bag of opinions; shows how the role of popular music has changed in our lives; counts the ways professional sports offend these days, ("Watching Monica Seles play Arantxa Vicario, two players who grunt with every stroke, I feel that I am inside a hernia testing center.") and laments how hard it is for one who's loved the games to chuck the increasingly hard to justify habit; praises napping and disparages name dropping. He comes to terms with turning 60 in "Will You Still Feed Me." The title of the book and of the lead essay means to suggest the writer has reached an age where the preening and overreaching are done, where possibilities are relinquished. He's not exactly asking what to make of a diminished thing, but conceding that the future, while still pleasing at 61, is contracted. He's reached the age where when reading a good book he feels obligated to do a good job of it as it's unlikely he'll read that book again. An age where every trip to the doctor's office carries the real threat that the doctor will find what he has been poking around looking for these many years. Epstein admits squeamishness, but denies being a hypochondriac, "..only your normal thanatophobe." He ponders the question of how to maintain dignity in the physician's office. "While respecting what they do and realizing the need for them, I have tried to the best of my ability to steer clear of physicians. I find that, given a chance, they discover things I would rather not know about." Once such discovery led to one of life's experiences Epstein would have as soon skipped, heart surgery. He describes it in "Taking the Bypass." Epstein might not think to label himself a conservative. In part because the breathless clamors that fill political journals -- elections, legislative maneuvering, the routine changes of government -- do not interest him much. He's aware of the overall seriousness of politics, especially where it's very bad. He is friends with people who lost family in Hitler's death camps. But his principle concern is the with the workings of the human heart, not with the routine insolences of office. His skepticism regarding all Big Ideas and his rejection of all causes that individuals must be sacrificed in the name of put him, literary temperament and all, on the right side of the angels. A conservative in all but registration. Not one to diminish literature by hitching it to any ideological wagon, Epstein has no patience with tenured Philistines who flog their agendas with the literary masters. In "The Pleasures of Reading," he nails these villains. "What wide reading teaches is the richness, the complexity, the mystery of life.I have come to believe there is something deeply apolitical something above politics in literature, despite what feminist, Marxist, and other politicized literature critics might think. If at the end of a long life of reading the chief message you bring away is that women have had it lousy, or that capitalism stinks, or that attention must above all be paid to victims, then I'd say you just might have missed something." Epstein takes his reading seriously (though not solemnly, as you'll see). He's amused by profiles of people who list reading as a hobby. "I should as readily list under my hobbies, tennis, travel, and breathing." Epstein notices how few grownups there are these days and parses this matter in "Grow Up Why Dontcha." No accident that Seinfeld and Friends became so popular in the land of the perpetual adolescent. Role models in arrested development come with the substantial tuitions at America's colleges in the person of paunchy professors, certifiably past fifty, wearing blue jeans, hiking shoes, and even in some cases, God help us, backpacks. "In our own day one still sees what are essentially sixties characters in their fifties, walking the streets, tie-dyed, long-haired, sadly sandaled, neither grateful nor dead, waiting for the magic bus to the past." Epstein manages to combine literary insights of the literature professor (Northwestern) that he is -- you'll encounter Proust, Montaigne, T.S. Eliot, and Solzhenitsyn in these pages -- with the acute observations of the street smart Chicago boy he also is. You'll also run across Joe Montana, Mike Ditka ( I did say Chicago), Floyd Patterson, and former welter weight Carmen Basilio. Epstein delights in all precincts of Vanity Fair. Epstein, like your average French desert, is pretty rich stuff and probably is better read an essay or two at a time. Those who've read A Line Out For a Walk, Once More Around the Block, With My Trousers Rolled, or The Middle of My Tether know this already. It probably wouldn't do anyone actual harm to read an entire book of Epstein essays at one sitting. But why take a chance? Larry Thornberry - Tampa [e-mail]

Rating:
Summary: Epstein at his best.
Review: Loved it. Have converted all my friends to Epstein enthusiasts

Rating:
Summary: ...and the nyads weep for they understand their loss.
Review: The melancholy title of this book alone is enough to bring back memories of that bleak afternoon when I read in the pages of my newly arrived copy of the American Scholar that my longtime never-met friend Joseph Epstein would no longer pay his quarterly visit to my home. For months, I could not bring myself to finish the originally published Aristides essay in which he announces his leaving of the Scholar. I felt as though I had been told of the death of a long time boon companion. I later came to realize that Mr. Epstein had, in fact, not resigned but had been pushed out. Curses! Curses I proclaimed upon the American Scholar (those curses, by the way, still remain in effect; I vigorously renew them every change I get). Yet Mr. Epstein, gentleman scholar that he is, has to my knowledge, handled the insult with all the dignity that Mr. Emerson would have wished for in the last true editor of this now ill named journal. He wrote one of the most eloquent and distinctive essays of his career. The entire book resonates with the feeling of this one essay. Perhaps this was not intentional, perhaps it was. Certainly the coming storm was visible on the horizon. One could even say that Mr. Epstein was steeling himself against the opposing armies surrounding his outpost on a literary Masada. Such things can be seen in the distance and the soul can do nothing else but to arm and defend. Mr. Epstein was killed, in the literary sense. His editorial armor was stripped and his body was left for the academic carrion feeders. Yet he survives. Perhaps he will not regain an editorial position; quality does not seem to be in demand in these days of Miss Brown and her ilk. The fact that books of this sublimity, wit, and style are yet published truly astonishes one when the weekly best-seller lists are examined. We can only thank God that Mr. Epstein is still alive, writing, and occasionally published in such journals as the New Criterion, Commentary, and other publications of like erudition and taste. Read "Narcissus Leaves the Pool." Read it with the understanding that it is the last chapter in the life story of a once great journal. Read it with the knowledge that it is not "With My Trousers Rolled" or "A Line Out for a Walk," it more complex than either of those fine collections. Read it with the hope that you will be allowed into the thoughts, both idle and collected, of one of the last great essayists left in the world. You will not be disappointed.