February 19, 2008
You ought to be reading Joseph Epstein
Here’s an article about an author I’ve been meaning to check out.
Writing in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Rabbi David Wolpe says, “Joseph Epstein combines … Yankee brio with a Yiddish wit and an elegant erudition that recalls [Max] Beerbohm. He is funny, he is wise and you ought to be reading him.”
Wolpe goes on to say this:
Epstein is the most consistently interesting, provocative, opinionated, disputatious and elegant essayist writing. I first picked up a book of his essays, called “A Line Out For a Walk,” in high school. The title was taken from artist Paul Klee who said that in his work he simply took a line out for a walk. Epstein does the same. He writes “personal essays,” which can be about writers he loves (or very entertainingly detests), about talking to yourself (keeping a journal), trivial irritations of life (“I also have a strong aversion to all botanical metaphors … I don’t much fancy ‘nurturing’ anybody”), his friends, Chicago, aging, all things English, the pecaddilos of politicians and on and on. The range of Epstein’s observations and deflations is suggested by the titles of some of his books apart from the essay and short story collections: “Friendship,” “Snobbery,” “Divorced in America,” “Envy,” “Ambition.” He has also written books on De Tocqueville and edited various collections of essays. This is a man who has looked at life.
Indeed, Epstein has been writing for a long time. How long? Well, at least since the time when Rabbi Wolpe was in high school. I’m assuming that’s at least a few decades because Wolpe is now a senior rabbi at Sinai Temple in Los Angeles. (He was born in 1958 according to his Wikipedia entry)
As for Epstein, he was born in 1937 and grew up in Chicago. He’s best known at the editor of American Scholar magazine. He was a lecturer at Northwestern University from 1974 to 2002 and, most recently, he’s been a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. For those of you interested in cultural criticism, I think you will enjoy his essay from the Weekly Standard entitled, “The Culture of Celebrity: Let us now praise famous airheads.”
Here’s an excerpt from his most recent book, “In a Cardboard Belt!: Essays Personal, Literary, and Savage,” published last September by Houghton Mifflin:
One of the most successful men I know once told me, without the least passion in his voice, “Actually, I dislike my parents quite a bit”—which didn’t stop him, when his parents were alive, from being a good and dutiful son.
(We are, after all, commanded to honor our parents, not necessarily to love them.) Taking the heat off parents for the full responsibility for the fate of their children throws the responsibility back on oneself, where it usually belongs. “I mean, I blame for every fuckups in my life my parents?” asked Mikhail Baryshnikov, who had a horrendously rough upbringing. His resounding answer to his own question was “No.” The best luck is, of course, to love one’s parents without complication, which has been my fortunate lot. Whether consciously or not—I cannot be sure even now—my parents gave me the greatest gift of all. By leaving me alone, while somehow never leaving me in doubt that I could count on them when needed, they gave me the freedom to go my own way and to become myself. Of the almost cripplingly excessive concern for the proper rearing of children in our own day, in all its fussiness and fear, my father’s response, I’m almost certain, would have been: “What’re they, crazy?”
So, Rabbi Wolpe, I think you’re right. I ought to be reading Joseph Epstein.