Plausible Prejudices: Essays on American Writing, by Joseph Epstein (Norton, 411 pp., $17.95)
The tradition of critical letters as practiced in the United States, especially since the time of the late and frequently benighted Edmund Wilson, is chiefly carried on today by such humane scholars as Paul Fussell, Kenneth S. Lynn, and Joseph Epstein—and the greatest of these is probably Epstein. He’s a marvel, really, although Fussell has the finer sense of history, while Lynn seems just as keen as both of them in other, subtler ways; but no one covers the literary estates more gracefully, or knows the territory more thoroughly, than does the editor of that esteemed quarterly, The American Scholar. He is also Commentary’s fiction critic, and he must be ranked as one of our best close readers of current fiction (to the extent it is worth reading), just as Helen Vendler is said to be our best close reader of poetry. Epstein’s title derives from an apophthegm of a kindred spirit of his, H. L. Mencken: “Criticism is a prejudice made plausible”; and the essays that embody and demonstrate the theme at the same time extend this volume as a legitimate successor to The Middle of My Tether, his previous collection of essays, which immediately confirmed Epstein as an observer not to be ignored. “Anything well written is literature,” Evelyn Waugh said, and Epstein ranges freely on this sensible dictum. Writing superbly on practically anything at all, one can’t be long ignored. Epstein is a literary essayist in the tradition of Hazlitt especially, Charles Lamb (though not so gentle of temperament), and George Orwell (without the ideological hangups). Keep literacy alive and read Epstein for pleasure and edification,
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