Books, Arts & Manners: Payment in Full

Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives, by Joseph Epstein (Norton, 429 p., $18.95)

Nowadays, while critics in the professional arena indulge in feverish overestimation, those in the academy busy themselves with the deconstruction of all literary value whatsoever. Meanwhile, a precious handful of writers—among whom Joseph Epstein is surely the foremost—are engaged in what might be called the reconstruction of our literary culture, or what Epstein himself has termed the Resistance. In his two alliteratively entitled collections, Plausible Prejudices and now Partial Payments, Epstein works both to deflate inflated reputations and to uncover genuine achievements that have been overlooked or undervalued, or looked at and valued for the wrong reasons. Moreover, with the pieces he writes as editor of The American Scholar, Epstein has revived the familiar essay, whose very form bespeaks a kind of intelligence, discrimination, cultivation, and taste that have not been conspicuous in recent decades. And both his critical and familiar essays are literary achievements in their own right—translucently readable, often deliciously amused and amusing, studded with choice nuggets from their author’s wide and varied reading. The voice is totally his own, both genial and astringent, honest, unhurried, subtle.

CI

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Carol Iannone

Carol Iannone writes on literature and culture.

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Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives, by Joseph Epstein (Norton, 429 p., $18.95)

Nowadays, while critics in the professional arena indulge in feverish overestimation, those in the academy busy themselves with the deconstruction of all literary value whatsoever. Meanwhile, a precious handful of writers—among whom Joseph Epstein is surely the foremost—are engaged in what might be called the reconstruction of our literary culture, or what Epstein himself has termed the Resistance. In his two alliteratively entitled collections, Plausible Prejudices and now Partial Payments, Epstein works both to deflate inflated reputations and to uncover genuine achievements that have been overlooked or undervalued, or looked at and valued for the wrong reasons. Moreover, with the pieces he writes as editor of The American Scholar, Epstein has revived the familiar essay, whose very form bespeaks a kind of intelligence, discrimination, cultivation, and taste that have not been conspicuous in recent decades. And both his critical and familiar essays are literary achievements in their own right—translucently readable, often deliciously amused and amusing, studded with choice nuggets from their author’s wide and varied reading. The voice is totally his own, both genial and astringent, honest, unhurried, subtle.