Most readers of COMMENTARY, for which Joseph Epstein has been writing for 60 years, know that he is one of the great essayists in the history of English literature. His essays derive much of their charm from his mastery of two other short forms, the anecdote and the aphorism, which make his prose sparkle. I used to tell myself that I would give two fingers to write as well as he does. Epstein has also written some splendid short stories, several of which have also appeared here.
Despite his taste for brevity, Epstein values most highly literature’s longest genre, the novel, and, especially, the great tradition of realist novels. I know no one who reads novels with greater subtlety and attention to fine shades of meaning, and that mastery is present on every page of his wonderful new book-length essay, The Novel, Who Needs It? In Epstein’s opinion, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Proust, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and especially Tolstoy—whom Epstein regards as the greatest of all novelists and perhaps the greatest of all writers—offer “truth of an important kind unavailable elsewhere in literature or anywhere else.” Reading the best novels “arouses the mind in a way that nothing else quite does.”
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