Familiar Territory: Observations on American Life
Epstein, Joseph
search of the kind Masmy has undertaken, and, less directly, from what Soviet scholars like Sivachev and Yakovlev choose to emphasize or ignore. What both approaches reveal, above all else,...
...Is the familiar essayist an irresponsible fellow who wastes our time by gossiping about trivial matters ? A reviewer in the New Republic complained almost wistfully that "Epstein does not seem to urge any social action . . . . " Well, no, he doesn't...
...The familiar essay is a mansion with many rooms in it, housing such varied contemporary writers as J o a n Didion, Edward Hoagland, and Lewis Thomas--to name some of the best...
...Certain that he was a terrible bore as a TV "personality," he laments: "All through the South I imagined men and women watching me over their breakfast, their heads nestling gently, asleep, in plates of scrambled eggs and cereal bowls...
...and discomfiting the reader by giving him advice...
...At his best Epstein makes the familiar strange...
...The familiar essayist, moreover, should avoid a number of things: embarrassing the reader by disclosStephen Miller is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...We don't appreciate familiar essayists because they take a particular stand on a question...
...We appreciate them, that is, less for their substance than for their style...
...Meet is an appropriate word, since the familiar essayist should write as if he were conversing with the reader-discoursing extemporaneously upon a subject that has for the moment seized his attention...
...Nevertheless, it holds many attractions for writers because it allows them to discuss innumerable subjects that, as Joseph Krutch has said, "are neither obviously momentous nor merely silly...
...Health, sophistication, naturalness, honesty, fulfillment...
...Epstein, whose familiar essays, gathered together in this volume, first appeared in the American Scholar under the pseudonym of Aristides...
...How pleasant to meet (again) Mr...
...In "Marlboro Country," which deflates the publishing business, Epstein tells us about his performances on the talkshow circuit while trying to peddle his first book...
...Epstein is not a chronicler of sordidness and absurdity, but at his best he succeeds in transforming the familiar territory of American manners into a puzzling country populated by souls driven to a t t a i n - - what...
...Although it looks easy enough to write, requiring neither strong scholarship nor a particularly rigorous argument, the familiar essay is difficult to bring off...
...F o r all the humor that runs through Epstein's work, there is also a melancholy strain as well, perhaps because Epstein is very much aware of the manifold ways in which many Americans strive to look down upon others--or even look down upon themselves...
...His essays are rich in precise observations about the oddities of American life, and he is especially perceptive when he takes a look at what we usually take for granted: the clothes we wear, the greetings we give to people...
...Good familiar essayists are argumentative, but they rarely are shrill...
...Jogging, self-help books, gourmet food, boutiques, and casual clothes all get their comeuppance...
...The familiar essayist should not fasten upon a subject but, rather, wander around one...
...they don't try to make us become better neighbors, citizens, friends, or lovers...
...They usually want to unsettle the reader, disturbing his moral or intellectual complacency, but at the same time they want to amuse him...
...In an essay on jogging, we learn of Taxicab Rabinowitz, who "inevitably appeared to be either emerging from or entering into yet another cab...
...their conclusions are less important than the distinctive ways in which they meander towards them...
...What, Epstein seems to wonder, should one make of the comic and pathetic aspects of the way we live now...
...ing too much of himself (familiar essays should not be confessional...
...What both approaches reveal, above all else, is the perpetual state of insecurity Soviet leaders seem to live under--a chronic inability to be at ease with the world as it is that both unsettles the balance of power and simultaneously generates the countervailing forces necessary to reconstitute it...
...In an essay that attacks what Philip Rieff has called "The Triumph of the Therapeutic," Epstein speaks of "the strange cluster of the desperately hopeful gathered under the banner of the human potential movement . . . . " Lionel Trilling once said that "the life of competition for spiritual status is not without its own peculiar sordidness and absurdity...
...we could do worse ourselves, in choosing our own...
...Good familiar essayists--and they include, as Epstein says in the introduction to his collection, Addison and Steele, Montaigne, Hazlitt, and Lamb--are like good conversationalists...
...Rabinowitz, Epstein tells us, was "the very antithesis of all that is implied by the phrase 'in shape.' " Some may think that praising a writer for his style is a backhanded compliment--a way of insinuating that the writer is all style, no substance...
...boring the reader by, say, explicating a text...
...The genre, if we can call it that, allows for--perhaps requires--digressions, which add to its appearance of informality...
...They try to entertain us with an unusual turn of phrase, a sudden sally of wit, an unexpected view of the commonplace...
...In any case, we suffer from an excess of writers who tell us what they think about Social Problems...
...But Epstein's opinions are, in a sense, beside the point...
...E p s t e i n ' s room is one with a view on American manners, especially the manners of America's upper-middle class...
...It is wrong, though, to assume that because Epstein is both an elegant and an unfailingly goodhumored writer, he is lightweight...
...In several essays he gently ridicules its major and minor snobberies...
...Epstein's style is moderately antic-unleaded, not high octane...
...The Soviet Union, like Richard Nixon, is its own worst enemy...
...He doesn't do a lot of things, but only a rigidly high-minded soul would argue that we should limit our reading to writers who wrestle with momentous subjects...
...He does not wear the reader out by trying to provide a laugh-a-minute, but he does move the argument along with a telling anecdote or a carefullyphrased exaggeration...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1980...
Vol. 13 • March 1980 • No. 3
