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AVIYA KUSHNER:
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Dancing between the raindrops of history

After 16 books and hundreds of essays and op-ed pieces, you’d think you could predict what a writer might be like. Wrong. The first surprise when I meet Joseph Epstein, the former editor of The American Scholar and one of the best-known essayists in America, is his glasses. They’re huge and funky - black-framed, round and more East Village rebel than Northwestern University professor. Though he takes the immense glasses off as soon as I sit down, it doesn’t matter.I’ve already seen them.

I know the glasses are way edgier than his staid book-jacket and publicity photo or sweet comment on the phone — "I’m small,‘ he said, when we discussed how we’d know each other. His genteel ’I should be delighted to meet you" in his initial e-mail also led me to imagine more delicate frames.

The glasses, which I can’t take my eyes off, definitely don’t fit with the copy of The Hudson Review, a highbrow academic and literary magazine that’s sitting at the edge of his table. So, I’ve been warned: Epstein might spring some stuff on me, the way life tends to spring things on his characters. The unpredictable, it turns out, is what motivates Epstein’s fiction.

"To me, a story is about the mysteries of life,"Epstein says when asked how he decides to write an essay or a story."I’ll give you an example. I got a letter from a guy at Sing Sing prison, and I asked a friend if I should answer it.

"He says, I can give you three reasons why not. He can call and ask you for money. He can ask you to write a letter to his parole board. And he can say, I’m getting out of prison and I want to spend a few days with you."

I gape.

"Your reaction is the same as mine,‘ Epstein says, laughing. ’Well, I didn’t want to take that risk. But I thought — that’s a story. So I wrote a story about a guy who actually answers the letter."

Epstein’s stories are all about people who finally do something, even if it’s not in their own best interest. These are guys who surprise themselves. And they’re all about outsiders, which Epstein views as a Jewish position.

"To be Jewish in America means to be detached, a little ironic," he says over raspberry sorbet and iced coffee in downtown Chicago. I catch myself thinking that this is a guy who contributes to mainstream American publications like Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal, a hardly detached state. Still, I’m willing to listen, and I’m looking for clues to the connection between the characters in Fabulous Small Jews, his new book of stories, and this small, somewhat grandfatherly man with the funky glasses.

"I don’t know if you picked up on this,‘ Epstein says, conspiratorially putting down his spoon. ’But they’re people who are caught between value systems. They’re mostly about people in what we call advancing middle age, and they feel oddly adrift in an America that’s changed. Or it should be a Western world that’s changed."

They’re also often obsessed with anti-Semitism, I point out. Is Epstein?

"Well, my father was.,‘ he remembers. Growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, Jewish identity was very much a factor, and his father frequently reminded him of it. ’I consider myself enormously lucky,‘ Epstein says. ’I’m a historically lucky person. I was born in 1937, and had I been born in Eastern Europe, there’s a good chance I would have been killed in the camps. I was at an age where I was too young to fight in World War II and Korea, too old for Vietnam; I’ve lived in the most unstintingly increasing prosperity. I’ve danced between the raindrops of history, and I’m immensely lucky."

EPSTEIN’S HAD a pretty lucky life for a writer, something he readily acknowledges. He’s been teaching at Northwestern University for 30 years, part-time for the past few. The arrangement has let him write 16 books and serve as the editor-in-chief of the distinguished journal The American Scholar. And of course, his short pieces have long been a part of the national conversation.

Epstein is considered one of the keen observers of manners — the way interactions between people have redefined what civility means and reshaped society. He’s also credited with raising the profile of the personal essay, which is an increasingly popular form among editors and writers in the United States. Lastly — and rarely — Epstein is still writing stories, and still improving them. He seems aware of the flaws in his early stories, and he can pinpoint why the new ones are better.

"I discovered that once I dropped obvious political ideas, that I was free to write stories,‘ he says. ’I think essays deal with matters that are dealt with best directly, with arguments and events, and stories deal with things that are outside of that, that are above the level of ideas. They’re about the more oblique experiences."

I’m wondering what he means by "oblique" when he helps me out.

"I’ll give you an example,‘ Epstein says. ’I have a story I just wrote — it hasn’t yet been published - about a man whom I knew who was an alcoholic, and when drunk, was a pretty big anti-Semite. And I found myself liking him. I preferred him sober, but I knew what he was like when he was drunk. And I also sensed that maybe when he was drunk he was truer than when he was sober — I’m not sure. But it seemed to me that that’s obviously the matter for a story." Stories, he says softly, are about the mysteries of human experience.

"I’ve also written a story about a man whose 19-year-old daughter has an abortion, and it disturbs him greatly,‘ he says. ’I don’t have daughters, but I shouldn’t like to learn that my 19-year-old daughter is having an abortion, even though I am pro-choice, and so one’s heart goes against one’s politics, and that’s a matter for a story."

Epstein is happily married to his "second and final wife," he says. And yet, many of the characters in his stories are divorced, longtime bachelors, or otherwise unfortunate in matters of the heart. They are mostly men who abandon their wives or their children, and in some cases, they even abandon their grandchildren. In many stories, the men are disappointments not only to the women around them, but to themselves.

"Men are essentially clownish figures," one character says.

Another theme in several of the stories is the horror of being married to an artist. "The Third Mrs. Kessler,‘ for instance, is about a young woman who falls in love with a concert pianist, in search of an ’interesting life.‘ Well, it may have been interesting, but it does not turn out that rosy. A second story on this theme, called ’My Little Margie," is about a brother who adores his younger sister. He wants only the best for her: the best schools, the best chance, the best husband. She selects a famous painter as a husband — an aging man four decades older than her who is not only non-Jewish, but is openly anti-Semitic. However, he is an undeniably great painter, and Margie’s shocked brother is forced to acknowledge the unpleasant man’s talent.

Here, again, Epstein seems interested in the frequent disconnect between genius and decency. "If I had a daughter,‘ he says, ’I would not want her to marry a writer. I find them somewhat inhuman. They see a woman and want to sleep with her so they can write about it."

Well, Epstein is certainly honest, which is probably why so much of his writing involves sticky topics. His next book is about another unmentionable — envy. He was asked by an editor to take on one of the seven sins, but decided that "at my age, it would be unseemly to write about lust." He’s also writing a book on friendship, which he views as a major force in contemporary society.

Of course, along with these larger non-fiction projects, he plans to continue writing stories, mostly set in his home turf of Chicago. Epstein is interested in nearly everything. As a result, he is always looking for his next subject. "Once your radar is out, you’re always on the lookout for material,‘ Epstein explains. ’Mordechai Richler, the Canadian novelist who died last year, once said that he divided his life between the time when he made his decision to become a writer and the time before was better."

He adds, "My way of thinking is once you make the decision to become a writer, a big part of life becomes the search for copy. And it’s the dirty secret of writers, that they’re not quite human. They may look as if they’re experiencing grief, but they’re also registering what that grief feels like, which makes them slightly. well, inhuman." The man in front of me seems very much human, but also very much a devoted, lifelong writer who does what he does because he’s interested in humans. The sorbet gone and the iced coffee sipped, he shakes my hand and turns down the familiar street in Evanston. Some of the men and women he would pass, I knew, would find their way into his next book.