Epstein examines the connections between friends in "Friendship: An Exposé"

"Friendship: An Exposé"
by Joseph Epstein
Houghton Mifflin, 270 pp., $24

Reading Joseph Epstein at his best is to find oneself off in an intimate corner, flatteringly entertained by the most interesting guy at the party.

He's best in shorter works; many of the essays and profiles within his books and three decades of work published by The New Yorker, Commentary, Harper's and Atlantic Monthly are gems.

Epstein puffs up a bit when expanding a single subject to book length, as is the case with "Friendship: An Exposé." This party you can slip away from, throw in a load of wash, check e-mail, grab a snack and come back to find that he's been chatting on all by himself, confident that you'd be back to pick up the story line. Yet he's still the most interesting guy there.

Within a single page you might find Epstein citing the known and the obscure; recalling, doubling back and analyzing. His editorial traversing is a fine method for exploring the complex subject of friendship. This book's subtitle, "An Exposé," might be better as "A Personal Journey" since its roving narrative is just that.

Yet Epstein, now in his 60s, is also very much a commentator of the contemporary scene, as he examines the bones and connective tissue of friendships of all kinds. He is satisfyingly unpredictable in his opinions; one expects him to rail against the decline of letter-writing between friends, for example, but he surprises with his spirited endorsement of e-mail.

Aside from its usefulness across time zones and busy lives, Epstein praises e-mail as a means to preserve connections that might not thrive in daylight, so to speak. Reflecting on a rich, longtime correspondence with a reader now considered a good friend, whom he has never met in person, Epstein confides: "I'm not sure we need to meet. We might be disappointed. Our wives might not cotton to each other, or to one or the other of us. But, then, we're fine as we are, I think, and I suspect that he thinks so, too."

Epstein is an adroit pulse-taker of changing mores, although he can be fusty in his views of sex differences. The following would suggest that he fails to eavesdrop at the gyms, bars, coffee shops or the movie lines in his neighborhood near Chicago:

"A man does not wish to hear about another man's fears, unpleasant secrets, deep disappointments ... Not that women necessarily are eager to hear about these things either, but they do not automatically declare them out of bounds, as men tend to do."

He is more on the mark with his trenchant observations of today's sprawling family life, a subject he has written about in earlier works with similar intelligence:

"Owing to the ever-higher degree of attention that parents pay to their adult children — child rearing, you will have noticed, is today a full-court press affair, with everyone very nervous about it — the family may be emerging as one of the unspoken enemies of friendship outside marriage."

Best are the many moments when he reflects on more abstract things. What makes a friendship stick? The shared shorthand of common history and cultural interests between friends makes very strong glue, yet it is not the only thing that binds people.

Friendships, Epstein observes, generally exist because two people communicate well, whether in person, on the telephone, by letter or e-mail: "One may fish, golf, quilt, or play bridge with a friend, one may or may not share his or her opinions, one may have many or few interests in common, but what most friends do with one another much of the time is talk."

In a mid-book discourse on sociological and personal differences that may impede friendship, he makes a wonderful observation, caught with the precision that makes his best work so satisfying:

"Everyone must try to make of friendship his own utopian country in which no inequalities exist, where the coin of the realm is imaginative sympathy, all competition and rivalrous feelings are strictly outlawed ... The earnest practice of friendship, in short, requires us to be rather better than most of the time we really are."