Word: epsteins
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...collection of essays, Plausible Prejudices, Joseph Epstein, a pillar of what has been called the Literary New Right, appoints himself sheriff of contemporary American literature...
...literary intrusions into creative and critical writing--he enters town "ready to apprehend delinquent writers' but just a little "too late to ambush the novelist John Irving, who has already ridden into town, cleaned out the banks, and ridden out again unharmed." While it is impossible to sum up Epstein's thoughts on American fiction, criticism, and literary life in general, his general theme is that "literature is going through a very bad patch at present...
...explanation for this so-called patch is what Epstein describes as the dispersed literary culture of the United States. American literati are spread out in the hundreds of universities across the nation, and while the university provides novelists with security and stability, it also narrows the range of their experience. The result, on the page, is a glut of "fornication and fashionable ideas, which seem to be the chief forms of experience and knowledge available at contemporary universities...
...even cocky kid of Brighton Beach, the Eugene of Biloxi Blues knows how little he knows. He is aware enough of the larger world to realize how many perils, including the war, may bar his path to glory. And through the nudging of his wise and principled friend Arnold Epstein (played with ferocious wit by Barry Miller), Eugene begins to grasp that his charm and amiability may mask the moral flaw of self-absorption. When Arnold stingingly accuses Eugene of being "a witness," devoid of passion and commitment, the insight may make an audience reconsider its feelings about the character...
...last time Martin Amis caused literary ripples on this side of the Atlantic, he was the offended party in a plagiarism scandal. That was in 1980 when a young American writer named Jacob Epstein confessed that he had not sufficiently "originalized" whole passages from Amis' first novel, The Rachel Papers, before incorporating them into his own fictional debut, Wild Oats. Now the son of British Novelist Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, One Fat Englishman) is back with a splash. Money: A Suicide Note is one of those infrequent novels that should divide readers into admirers and detractors, with little room...