Witty look at what friends are really for

WORKS of social criticism are perennially popular. They’re all about us, after all -- and most people clearly enjoy talking and hearing about themselves.

Joseph Epstein, who belongs to our scant handful of genuinely witty and readable essayists, has put productive self-regard at the heart of his project as a writer. His frequent method is to take some aspect of the human condition -- envy and snobbery previously, and now friendship in his new volume -- situate it in contemporary America and explore its operation in his own life.

It’s a tricky proposition. A less skillful writer might as well go ahead and post a sign reading, “This way to the swamp of self-infatuation.” Epstein, however, is a master of the familiar essay. In his hands, the personal anecdote is a way of arguing from the particular to the general, opening his reflections to the storyteller’s art, moving his observations beyond abstraction with the convincing authority of experience.

That’s a welcome trait, because most contemporary essays are dead on arrival, and if you performed a literary autopsy on the dreary little things, you’d have to list the cause of death as morbid didacticism.

“Friendship: An Expose” is that rare thing -- a rewardingly unsuccessful book and the furthest thing from dreary. The book is constructed as a linked sequence of 19 essays and proceeds from Epstein’s intuition that social change and technology have today transformed friendship, constraining many of its traditional expressions and creating important new ones -- most notably inside marriage and in platonic connections between unrelated men and women.

“Friendship,” in fact, seems most provocative when Epstein writes that the altered status of women was the “great event of the second half of the 20th century.” In his view, greater equality for women made possible new kinds of friendship between women and men and between husbands and wives, though it also increased demands on men and choked off many opportunities for traditional male friendships.

The West’s cultural history over the last century and a half or so tends to support Epstein’s intuition. Romanticism transformed marriage from an economic arrangement to a vehicle of transcendent and idealized attachment. Our own era first eroticized that ideal and, then, demanded that it -- like nearly everything else in our society -- serve therapeutic ends. Thus, the state of matrimony is now supposed to be simultaneously an egalitarian financial partnership, a venue for Rabelaisian sex and an engine of every conceivable personal fulfillment, all “facilitated” by one’s “soul mate.” It’s also supposed to produce perfect children, of course.

Since expectations have about the same weight as lead by volume, that’s quite a burden for one little social institution. No wonder the poor thing so frequently seems to be crumbling under the load.

When Epstein appraises the character of these new marital friendships, of those between men and women and of those that survive exclusively within one or the other gender, he tends to come up a bit short. That’s because, in this book, he too often seems to conflate inhibition and character and to confuse mere convention with authentic tradition.

The result is a rather brittle and, despite his unforced and formidable erudition, somewhat prissy conception of friendship. “I believe I am willing to take friends as I find them,” he writes, “but only after taking the most precise measure of them possible.... “

Epstein is at his best when he struggles openly with the concept of friendship and is heedless of the contradictions in his own conclusions and conduct. In the chapter titled, “The Quickest Way to Kill Friendships,” he mulls over his own criteria for friends -- a sense of humor a must, anti-Semitism an insurmountable barrier. “Given my squareness, which I prefer to consider merely ironic conformity,” Epstein writes, “I do not have any male friends who have ponytails or female friends with large tattoos.”

There are other sorts of boundaries. “Perhaps the quickest way for me to lose interest in possible friendship with a person is for him or her to drop all reticence soon after meeting and shift directly into confessional-intimacy mode,” he writes. “I do intimacy well only with my wife, but even before I married I shied away from deep intimacy with friends.... If I strongly felt the need for regular confession, I would consider psychoanalysis or the Catholic Church.”

Friends, he says, must be chosen carefully, cultivated artfully and their ranks “edited” from time to time. Having laid all this out, Epstein then admits that most of his friendships just seem to happen and proceed quite apart from his criteria. He quotes the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who wrote that “to discard friends because they do not behave as we expected and refuse to be educated to our requirements is the conduct of a man who has altogether mistaken the character of friendship.... The relationship of friend to friend is dramatic, not utilitarian; the tie is one of familiarity, not usefulness.”

Thus, Epstein sensibly concludes: “Few things are likelier to kill a friendship than a careful and strictly adhered-to theory of what qualities are needed in a friend.”

In my own library are a couple of shelves reserved for books by friends. “Friendship: An Expose” brought two of them to mind. The dedication of John Gregory Dunne’s penultimate novel generously describes me as someone with “a talent for friendship.” If it really exists, it’s a talent exercised in so miserly a fashion that I’ve always taken John’s sentiment as an admonition rather than a compliment. Christopher Hitchens inscribed my copy of one of his collections this way: “To Tim, close reader, stern critic, firm friend.” And so we have remained, though our views on various people and issues of some importance could not be more different. The central importance Epstein attaches to loyalty toward friends in this book is not, I think, misplaced.

Where Epstein’s expose of friendship is deficient is in its attention to the verb “befriend.” The implications of that word are active in a deep sense. Friendship signifies more than making yourself available to someone else. It entails being mindfully responsive to the other person, even when inconvenient. To my mind, being a friend means knowing that tact and candor are equally valuable and having enough discretion to understand when one is required and not the other. The chapter on “Broken Friendships” is replete with examples of what occurs when such discretion is lacking.

Epstein may be correct when he approvingly quotes La Rochefoucauld’s assertion that, “However rare true love may be, it is less so than true friendship.” But that may be truer for some than for others.

“Friendship: An Expose” is a smart, delightfully literate and sophisticated book, and yet -- for all the author’s studied frankness -- an implacably reticent one. What’s missing is that mysterious tenderness the late Frank O’Hara expressed when he mused on his dead friends and wondered: “but is the / earth as full as life was full, of them?”