Word: epstein
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...Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul ∙ Mirabell: Books of Number, James Merrill ∙ Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick Sophie's Choice, William Styron Testimony and Demeanor, John Casey ∙ The Living End, Stanley Elkin ∙ Wild Oats, Jacob Epstein...
Naipaul ∙Mirabell: Books of Number, James Merrill ∙Sleepless Nights, Elizabeth Hardwick Sophie's Choice, William Styron Testimony and Demeanor, John Casey ∙The Living End, Stanley Elkin -Wild Oats, Jacob Epstein NONFICTION: Bay of Pigs, Peter Wyden ∙Billy Graham, Marshall Frady ∙Blood of Spain, Ronald Fraser ∙Confession and Avoidance, Leon Jaworski ∙The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas ∙The Powers That Be, David Halberstam ∙To Set the Record Straight, John J. Sirica
...college-inspired novels this side of Fitzgerald's Paradise have been even B-plus efforts. Wild Oats is a refreshing exception. Recent Yale Graduate Jacob Epstein set his low-key whimsy at fictitious Beacham University, a liberal arts college with a hundred-year tradition of the second-rate. Its off-centerpiece, Billy Williams, literally starts off on the wrong foot by stepping on the college master's dachshund at a cocktail party. He writes a term paper on the Iliad titled "The Shoes of the Greeks," falls for a coed named Zizi Zanzibar and takes Chinese...
...could go home again. But back in Manhattan lurk Billy's sister Abby, who clomps "the treacherous hike from the bathroom to the kitchen linoleum" in hiking boots; his twice-divorced mother; and her balding lover Henry, whom Billy catches poring over nymphet glossies in a porn shop. Epstein is at his best with fresh comic perceptions of growing up absurd in a multiparent home. He is at his weakest in describing Billy's moony infatuation with Zizi, which leads to the novel's adolescent denouement...
Still, this is promising reading from a young author (son of Jason Epstein, editorial director of Random House) who is just funny enough to be taken seriously...