Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life.

Pertinent Players: Essays on the Literary Life, by Joseph Epstein (Norton, 416 pp., $24.95)

A GOOD book review, Joseph

Epstein once wrote, is "the product of an interesting mind thinking about a book."A good literary essay, by the same token, is the product of an interesting mind thinking about literature, and there are few minds in the literary firmament today so interesting--or interested-as Mr. Epstein's. In this, his second collection of essays devoted exclusively to various estimable writers of the past, Epstein ranges from the great (Henry James, R.L. Stevenson, Isaac Bashevis Singer) to the enduringly good (Hazlitt, Mencken, Orwell, Maurice Baring) to the quirky (Chamfort, H. W. Fowler, Italo Svevo). These essays, witty, voluminously informative, and perceptive, stand in the best line of belles-lettres. While they aren't exactly academic, they are certainly learned, which is infinitely better these days; Epstein mines deeply in search of defining moments and underlying causes and effects in complicated lives, revealing the "mystifying patterns" that refuse to yield easy, certifiable portraits. How invigorating to find an essayist able to examine personalities without rendering diagnoses, one focused on the utter, irreducible individuality of each mind and spirit and their relationship to the writer's work. Epstein, an apologist for the common yet discriminating reader, is persuasive in much the same way that a fine wine is persuasive--the pleasure it gives is its own justification. Life and literature, he tells us, aren't far apart for the person who lives with "a literary point of view, which sees the world as sad, comic, heroic, vicious, dignified, ridiculous, and endlessly amusing"; in other words, the educated literary reader is fully human, an observation as simple as it is true. Such an education is within the grasp of everyone, given enough curiosity, not excepting those holding doctorates in literature.