SOURCE: Kavanagh, P. J. “Coming Up Smarter.” Spectator 280, no. 8848 (7 March 1998): 37.

In the following review, Kavanagh offers a stylistic overview of the essays in Life Sentences, contending that Epstein's seriousness about his literary subjects gives his essays depth.

The civilised literary causerie is not dead, it is not even out of fashion. It is alive and kicking in the pages of the New Yorker. Every once in a while Joseph Epstein contributes to that magazine a piece on some author who has tickled his fancy: from Montaigne to Joseph Conrad, to Ken Tynan—the tickle can come from anywhere (or prickle, he doesn't like everybody)—and, as he says, he ‘gets his education in public’. His procedure is surely right: he tackles authors who

until I actually do write about them, I don't always know all that much about. I read up, I think through, I write out, and...