Joseph Epstein’s new book about snobbery1 ends up being a book about Joseph Epstein, which is perfectly okay—provided one is Joseph Epstein. Another’s book about snobbery, displaying the author’s biography, his likes and dislikes, suspicions, affections, affectations, crotchets, would not guarantee against a reader’s strayed attention. There isn’t the slightest risk of this happening upon reading Epstein’s book, because he is perhaps the wittiest writer (working in his genre) alive, the funniest since Randall Jarrell.
“My snobbery,” he sighs, “is of a different kind, the kind I think of as intellectual snobbery.”
Epstein sets out dutifully to tell us what a snob is—what he does, thinks (about nubile objects of snobbery), cultivates, disdains. He accomplishes this by conveying everything that Epstein is not. He is not ignorant, certainly not a Philistine, and he is perfectly capable, even if some effort is required, of transcending snobbish inclinations, though not always willing to do so. He is dogged in pressing home on the reader that he, Joseph Epstein, is human, experiencing, and giving way to, occasional temptations if not exactly to snobbery, to snobbish practices. He invites us to smack our lips over Joseph Epstein, Jaguar owner, the young man with the Burberry coat who has now a $300 fountain pen. But his way of telling you about such vulnerabilities is so fetching you want to reach through the confessional screen and embrace the sinner. And anyway, all that stuff about incidental luxuries doesn’t really matter.