SOURCE: Core, George. “Vessels of Consciousness.” Hudson Review 42, no. 4 (winter 1990): 692-96.

In the following positive review, Core lauds the essays in Partial Payments as perceptive and engaging and regards Epstein as “one of our finest critics as well as a cultural commentator of great perceptiveness and subtlety.”

Experience is never limited, and it is never complete: it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web … suspended in the chamber of consciousness.

I never see the leading interest of any human hazard but in a consciousness (on the part of the moved and moving creature) subject to a fine intensification and wide enlargement.

—Henry James

Joseph Epstein's Partial Payments,¹ his second book of literary essays since 1985, stands as one of the best collections of criticism to appear in the past year—a time that has seen the publication of collections by Jacques Barzun, William Maxwell, the late Richard...