Familiarity Breeds Content

February 15, 2024
A warm collection from a writer who loves to play with words. The prolific, opinionated humorist Epstein offers up yet another collection of essays, from 1978 to 2023, starting off with a wry piece on the significance of jokes--"punch lines from jokes rattle around quite comfortably" in his head "alongside lines of poetry"--followed by an essay on letters--"I adore mail"--followed by a lovely survey of same in literature. He's as adept at discussing juggling as he is at doing it, and, generally speaking, he believes there are "not two but four kinds of generalization." The typical Epstein essay is besotted with aphorisms, his and others'. In "This Sporting Life," this "couch athlete" proclaims his desire "to free myself of my bondage to watching sports." Epstein easily slides from topic to topic: friendships, being a good guy, the seven deadly sins, especially gluttony, ex-smoker Epstein on smoking, fame, hats, envy (he's desirous to have a "good name among a select audience of the genuinely thoughtful"), blurbs ("my blurbs truly aren't worth dying for"), cats or dogs, and short men and women. On aging, he wrote at 50 that he hoped to reach "ninety-seven" (he's now 86) but sadly confesses he probably won't "write a novel as long and as good as Proust's." Epstein's effusive about his love of reading. As a young man he began reviewing books for pay--"exhilarating." In "The Bookish Life," all "means and no end," he heaps praise on Willa Cather--the "greatest twentieth-century American novelist." He closes with a rather censorious essay on taste, confessing to not liking tattoos, rap music, and the inauthentic Bob Dylan, letting him "blow in his own rather pretentious wind." Friendly, personal essays in the Jean Shepherd mold.

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