Books in Brief: The Middle of My Tether

The Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays, by Joseph Epstein (Norton, 250 pp., $14.95)

If there were a truth-in-titling law, Joseph Epstein, who edits The American Scholar, would be judged to be in compliance. He is never even close to the end of his tether. He is a friendly soul, whose occasional exasperations never boil toward rage or fester into gloom. He is mildly cantankerous at worst—wry and curmudgeonly like your favorite prof. It all stems from his childhood, which, he confesses, was happy. He writes about little things, like fountain pens, moviegoing, juggling, and failures of memory, and bigger ones, like Manhattan (you take it; he’s had it), or what he tends to think of as “creeping vulgarity .. . the way Taft Republicans used to think of creeping socialism.” (Lauren Bacall and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies are some of what he has in mind.) Like any good essayist he likes to quote, and if a man’s literary gods are to be reckoned as those he quotes most, then his are Proust and Mencken. Strange bookfellows. Chicago, not Paris or Baltimore, is Epstein’s home, but some of his best sentences are about New York: “In time everyone in New York does come to look Jewish, including most non-Jews. After a while the horses pulling cabs in Central Park look Jewish; even the eggs benedict come to look Jewish.” But for every couple of on-the-spot phrases (“more eye-shadow than a raccoon”) there is a joke that comes too easily (“confections of goo and rock that have helped make American dentists among the leading money earners of our time”), or some stillborn neologism like “de-spoused.” It is not his style to beat a subject into submission. What he most likes to do is amble amusingly around some of its subtopics. In “Onomastics, You and Me Is Quits” he strolls past nicknames, name-changers, rhyming names, mismatched given and surnames, middle names, middle initials, and aliases. The name of Mr. Epstein’s game is pleasant observation, with the occasional little end-run of satisfying induction: “Nothing so improves the appearance as a high opinion of oneself.” This last observation comes from a piece on physiognomy, which nimbly carves itself up into bits about noses and make-up and plastic surgery and so on. But if he rightly declares himself against the Keatsian equation of truth and beauty, he predictably refuses to keep climbing to the crux—namely, why we love the beautiful even when we know they’re no good. Epstein is much easier to sit down to than the grey Russell Baker or the ghastly Andy Rooney, but what keeps him from being a great essayist is that he is finally too familiar. Who doesn’t dislike talking to someone wearing sunglasses? Who does like undelivered mail? Most of the great essayists, like Hazlitt and Lamb, have been just a little crazy around the edges; Mr. Epstein is too mentally healthy to rise above being consistently and pleasingly readable, and so he finally fails E. M. Forster’s still useful test for a “round” character—that he be “capable of surprising in a convincing way.”

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The Middle of My Tether: Familiar Essays, by Joseph Epstein (Norton, 250 pp., $14.95)

If there were a truth-in-titling law, Joseph Epstein, who edits The American Scholar, would be judged to be in compliance. He is never even close to the end of his tether. He is a friendly soul, whose occasional exasperations never boil toward rage or fester into gloom. He is mildly cantankerous at worst—wry and curmudgeonly like your favorite prof. It all stems from his childhood, which, he confesses, was happy. He writes about little things, like fountain pens, moviegoing, juggling, and failures of memory, and bigger ones, like Manhattan (you take it; he’s had it), or what he tends to think of as “creeping vulgarity .. . the way Taft Republicans used to think of creeping socialism.” (Lauren Bacall and the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies are some of what he has in mind.) Like any good essayist he likes to quote, and if a man’s literary gods are to be reckoned as those he quotes most, then his are Proust and Mencken. Strange bookfellows. Chicago, not Paris or Baltimore, is Epstein’s home, but some of his best sentences are about New York: “In time everyone in New York does come to look Jewish, including most non-Jews. After a while the horses pulling cabs in Central Park look Jewish; even the eggs benedict come to look Jewish.” But for every couple of on-the-spot phrases (“more eye-shadow than a raccoon”) there is a joke that comes too easily (“confections of goo and rock that have helped make American dentists among the leading money earners of our time”), or some stillborn neologism like “de-spoused.” It is not his style to beat a subject into submission. What he most likes to do is amble amusingly around some of its subtopics. In “Onomastics, You and Me Is Quits” he strolls past nicknames, name-changers, rhyming names, mismatched given and surnames, middle names, middle initials, and aliases. The name of Mr. Epstein’s game is pleasant observation, with the occasional little end-run of satisfying induction: “Nothing so improves the appearance as a high opinion of oneself.” This last observation comes from a piece on physiognomy, which nimbly carves itself up into bits about noses and make-up and plastic surgery and so on. But if he rightly declares himself against the Keatsian equation of truth and beauty, he predictably refuses to keep climbing to the crux—namely, why we love the beautiful even when we know they’re no good. Epstein is much easier to sit down to than the grey Russell Baker or the ghastly Andy Rooney, but what keeps him from being a great essayist is that he is finally too familiar. Who doesn’t dislike talking to someone wearing sunglasses? Who does like undelivered mail? Most of the great essayists, like Hazlitt and Lamb, have been just a little crazy around the edges; Mr. Epstein is too mentally healthy to rise above being consistently and pleasingly readable, and so he finally fails E. M. Forster’s still useful test for a “round” character—that he be “capable of surprising in a convincing way.”