SOURCE: Fuller, Edmund. “Paid in Full.” Sewanee Review 98, no. 1 (winter 1990): ii-iv.

In the following review, Fuller argues that in Partial Payments Epstein succeeds in rehabilitating the works of several important authors.

In introducing these nineteen essays [in Partial Payments], Joseph Epstein prefers not to describe himself as a literary critic, though admitting he is practicing as such. “I continue to think of myself as someone who is essentially a reader—a man who takes a deep pleasure in good books, and views reading as a fine mode of acquiring experience, and who still brings the highest expectations to what he reads.”

In Plausible Prejudices (1985) and elsewhere he has shown himself wittily severe about books for which he has little respect. In the present volume, by contrast, in varying degrees, he does several things that Jacques Barzun considers important functions of a critic—“redirects our attention to revive appreciation...