Mr. Algren, meet Mr. Bellow.
The problem with being a Jewish writer from Chicago is much like the problem of being a Southern writer from Oxford, Mississippi. One of the iconic writers, the Living American Library type, has taken his Moby dick and pissed all over your territory. And indeed, sometimes reading a very nicely conceived story, like "Uncle Jack," in which a University of Chicago mathematician reviews his relationship with his mother's lover, a stylish gangster lawyer (a la Sidney Korshak), the mind does drift gently Humboldt's Gift-ward.
What else are we supposed to think when we are told that "President Kennedy's father used to send him ["Uncle" Jack] a case of Piper-Hiedsick every year at Christmas?" The luxury brand name, the social placing that exactly pinpoints Uncle Jack's spot on the map of the secret powers that be, and just that little parting joke of the occasion?Christmas, a goy holiday during which a Catholic philanderer and a Jewish shyster can bond over an ostentatious champagne?we've learned to read the poetry of this stuff from Bellow. But Epstein takes a pretty resolute attitude towards the anxiety of influence: screw it. The reader should follow suit.
The Babbits, here, are of two types: college-educated and self-made men. The self-made type goes owns a bar or a scrap metal business or something involving long hours?saving and expanding the business. These stories often involve the study of some other character, sometimes a little up the status ladder from him. The unnamed saloon owner who narrates "Love and the Guinesss Book of Records," for instance, observes from the mahogany sideline of a bar the extended and rather absurd love affair between his friend Vivian and a noted doctor, Charlie Fairfax, trying to "figure out" how this adultery petrified into something exactly like a bad marriage. The professionals are wildly successful gastroenterologists or divorce lawyers. They know how to turn a buck. They are willing to give cultural capital its due, as long as it doesn't marry their daughter. Some, like the bitterly comic Hefferman in "Postcards," have had to choose Plan B in life (in Hefferman's case, that consists of trading soybean futures on the floor of the Commodity Exchange instead of publishing small volumes of well-regarded poetry), and cast a baleful eye on the general bad faith all-too-pervasive among the high brow set.
The second set of characters, the academics, are either successful scholars, with tweedy references to Princeton and University of Chicago and thoughts on the strain of Jew-hating among the great English modernists; or unsuccessful, with references to teaching sociology at DePaul and the general implied indistinction of tenure and tedium. The stories about the successful ("The Master's Ring," "The Executor") conform to the theme of art vs. life that used to be popular among the Trilling set in the 50s. They are a little too gentilely genteel for my taste. I much prefer the resentments and second thoughts of the unsuccessful sociologist in "Howie's Gift", which reminds us of the Epstein who penned last year's pitiless reflection on status and appetite, Snobbery: The American Version.
While social and standing gives us the situations in these stories, the mood here is very much about men without women. Men from marriages that ended in divorce; men who played the field until they woke up permanently single at 50; men whose wives have passed on. Elaine, the divorced wife of a famous pianist in "The Third Mrs. Kessler," is the single female in these stories whose p.o.v is our scoop.
Otherwise, the vision here is as virile as the handball at the YMCA. It isn't just male, it is 50s male, with a set of obsolete routines, as Lou Leven explains in "Moe": "? guys like us are destined no longer to appear on the face of the earth. We're soon to be extinct. The way we think, the way we act, Jesus, even handball, the game we play is on its way out. Nobody under sixty plays this game anymore."
The decline and fall of the world these guys made for themselves is symbolized by the liberated woman in all her forms: the academic feminist; the lesbian; the suburban Mom with the faddish diet, the over-protective child rearing and maybe as a result the separated husband. These are the hetaera of the apocalypse, otherwise known as the last quarter of the 20th century. Epstein's male characters characteristically can't understand, or stand, them.
Finally, it should be emphasized that these stories are fun. They don't wow with stylistic razzle-dazzle, nor do they indulge in postmodern irony. Collections so often consist of short stories that are as officiously perfect as Flavr Savr tomatoes?and just as tasteless. They are produced more as career moves in the English department, applications for that vacant creative writing teaching post, than as tales to be enjoyed by the reader. Epstein's, on the other hand, are shamelessly readable.
When one of Epstein's more boorish characters remarks, "I prefer stories in which someone has to make a decision" over stories that are "all sensitivity and sensibility. Everything tending toward the small, oblique insight," he is trying to insult a feminist literatus. However, there's a grain of truth in that insult. Although Epstein is too much the artist not to realize that, in fiction, every truth holds an equal and opposite counter-truth.
As the feminist responds, "Odd that your taste runs to stories of that kind," she said. "Since you yourself seem to have made so few big decisions in your life."