SOURCE: Dirda, Michael. “The Pleasure of Their Company.” Washington Post Book World 19, no. 5 (29 January 1989): 4.

In the following review, Dirda views the essays in Partial Payments as Epstein's successful attempts to “discover and estimate the moral character of authors” rather than offering literary criticism of their work.

Among literary entertainers now at work Joseph Epstein may be the all-around best. V. S. Pritchett has read more fiction and Gore Vidal brings in bigger crowds, John Simon can be wittier and Anthony Burgess more encyclopedic, but Epstein can hold his own, and then some, with these better known stars of letters.

Not quite a critic, yet more than a reviewer, Epstein is funny, smart, mildly boastful, fearless, politically conservative, narrow in his taste in fiction (give him that old-time realism) and a pleasure to read. Who can resist a man who writes, of the obligation to denounce the fake and...