Customer Reviews

Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life

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The best thing that can be said about this volume of Epstein's essays is that he usually chooses good subjects, and he quotes from their writings judiciously. This is not to say that Epstein always writes about well-documented writers; several of the pieces in this volume examine the achievements of nineteenth-century literary titans whose fame has faded with time. Epstein's other strength is that, while his writing is often fussy and over-cute (he frequently reads like an unfunny Calvin Trillin), he abjures jargon.

When it comes to originality of ideas or interpretation, however, the Epstein bag of tricks is empty. He takes an instant dislike to any writer whose politics don't toe the neo-con line; and he draws his findings from a demonstrably shallow series of researches. In writing the essay on Sydney Smith, for example, Epstein appears to have done no more than flick through the biographies of Hesketh Pearson and Peter Virgin. And while I approve of Epstein's championing of Henry James as a writer, I find his method -- a diary record of a class he taught, that opens with a series of glowing student evaluations -- bland and sometimes embarrassing. Lionel Trilling is insulted a few times by Epstein in the course of this collection, but any discriminating reader will find more illumination in a paragraph of 'The Liberal Imagination' than is present in the whole of 'Pertinent Players'.