SOURCE: Balée, Susan. “Sexy Wits.” Hudson Review 52, no. 3 (autumn 1999): 517-20.

In the following review, Balée offers a laudatory assessment of Epstein's essays in Narcissus Leaves the Pool, praising him as “one of America's best living essayists.”

To our bodies we are bound. They ground us and, in the end, they grind us down. Joseph Epstein begins his latest collection of essays, Narcissus Leaves the Pool, contemplating his naked, sixty-year-old bod in a bathroom mirror. What he sees—drooping buttocks, wrinkly red elbows, superfluous sacs of skin—depresses him. Even Narcissus, he tells us, “had he grown well into middle age … would surely have spent a lot less time gazing into the pool.” Clean living, exercise, cosmetic surgery, a diet rife with leafy vegetables—nothing avails against the inevitable ravages of time. “The body exists to demonstrate, if demonstration is needed, that progress has its limitations.”

On...