“I
read these writers partly because much of my education has been through
fiction, partly because I still love the novel and short story above all other
literary forms, and partly because I hope they will tell me things I do not
know about the way we live now. I find I do learn some of these things, though
I am not sure I am getting a healthy return on my investment. But, then, I may
have reached the age when nothing seems quite new and everything begins to
remind me of everything else. I may be coming to a time when only amusing
children and acts of inexplicable goodness are capable of astonishing me.”
As
is customary with his essays, Epstein accomplishes something difficult and
makes it looks casual and effortless. In a tone almost breezy, he mingles the
personal and critical without compromising either. Consider the first sentence
in the passage quoted above. Fiction-as-education will strike young readers as quaint.
Their education probably taught them that novels and stories are: 1.) escapist
entertainment; 2.) agit-prop; 3.) a dreary alternative to YouTube. Epstein’s
love of fiction, which must at least on occasion remain unrequited, is
touching. That he values it above other literary forms, even the essay, reminds
us of the excellence of his own stories (collected in The Goldin Boys: Stories, 1991; Fabulous
Small Jews, 2003; The Love Song of A.
Jerome Minkoff: And Other Stories, 2010) and their likely importance to him
as a writer. The Trollope allusion recalls Henry James’ reference to the
Victorian’s “complete appreciation of the usual.”
Where
would our moral education be without James, Proust and Cather? Stunted, surely,
and even more backwardly self-centered. Stories teach us to pay attention to
each other; to monitor the impact we have on family, friends and strangers; to
weigh the unexpected hurts and consolations of daily living. Stories charge the
commonplace with significance. James writes in “The Art of Fiction” (1884):
“Art
derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face
of presumptions, and some of the most interesting experiments of which it is
capable are hidden in the bosom of common things.”
One
of the reasons I read most anything by Epstein is the elegant attentiveness he lavishes
on “common things.” His stories and essays, and his books on de Tocqueville and
Fred Astaire, aren’t gussied-up and don’t strain after momentousness. He knows
how to enjoy himself and how to share his enjoyment with readers. Near the end
of “Will You Still Feed Me?” he writes:
“I
wish to minimize my stupidity, maximize my intelligence. `For those who are not
angry at things they should be angry at are fools,’ wrote Aristotle, and yet, I
sense, to be angry is, somehow, to be wrong. I want to limit to amused contempt
my response to life’s irritations. I realize that I cannot stand in the way of
regress. I wish to live with a respect for the complexity of life without
unduly complicating my own life.”
For
this post-sixty reader, no longer euphemistically “late-middle-aged,” Epstein’s
words are soothing. Anger is so exciting to those who wield it and so tiresome
for the rest of us. Sustained anger suggests selfishness, crippled
emotions and failure of imagination. It's better to know gratitude and recognize “acts
of inexplicable goodness.”
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