I'll Be There for You

OF all the species of human relationships, friendships might be the most peculiar. Friends are not bound to us by law or blood. We don't leave them huge sums in our wills. Yet we expect loyalty and lasting affection from them, and they from us, even as our lives become complicated by marriage, kids, humiliating failures, intimidating successes, rises and slips in status, surprises and dips in luck, illnesses, blessings, loss. How, Joseph Epstein wants to know in "Friendship: An Exposé," are friendships supposed to withstand all this stuff? How did friendship go from being the blissful, "unalloyed pleasure" of our youths to something spiny with ambivalence and obligation?
It's a good question, and a great one for Epstein, who's proved himself a formidable taxonomist of human instincts and institutions, breaking them down as a biologist does a kingdom. Over the course of his long and unnervingly prolific career (he's the former editor of The American Scholar, and the author of 17 books and several hundred essays), he has explored such topics as divorce, morality, ambition (in a book by the same name) and envy (ditto). "Snobbery," a nifty catalog of snootiness, became a New York Times best seller in 2002.
But friendship is an awkward subject for him. Repeatedly — oppressively, almost — Epstein says that he doesn't go in for the therapeutic, that he does not find sharing "manly," that he doesn't "wish to burden friends with such meager inner turmoil as I possess." Writing a book about friendship under these circumstances is a bit like reviewing a restaurant as a vegetarian. How they handle our vulnerabilities, secrets and deepest fears is precisely what gives our friends such remarkable power, in ways both magnificent and terrifying. How interesting can the observations of a man who avoids such entanglements be?
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Credit Christoph Abbrederis
The answer, for the most part, is not so very. Which is a shame, because it's usually easy to spend time in Epstein's company. He writes in graceful, rhythmic prose (one can almost hear the metronome ticking in the background); he's careful and methodical; he quotes resourcefully from his favorite thinkers. This approach worked beautifully with a subject like snobbery, and there are moments in this book, especially when he's discussing friendships in literature, that satisfy and surprise. But quoting literature isn't a substitute for one's own experience.
"Friendship" mostly seems detached, somehow bloodless; one wishes, just once, that Epstein would trade in his surgeon's knife for a fishmonger's, and give us not clean incisions but bones and sludge and blue guts. He's formal even when professing his goofiness — "He also encourages the madcap in me, which is very agreeable," he says of one friend — and dispassionate when discussing his sadness. "In a fortunate life," he says, "I have had only two serious (nonmedical) setbacks: I went through a divorce in my early 30's and I lost a son in his 28th year, when I was myself 53." Hearing a divorce described as a setback is common enough, but the death of a son is not; one reads on, expecting him to open up, to explain how his friendships bore this loss. Did they freeze? Intensify? Strain under the weight of his sadness? He never says. "A friend who is a psychiatrist, subsequently a good friend, once asked me, in the spirit of kindness, if I cared to talk to him about it," he writes. "I said no, thank you. The only one I care to talk to about it is God, though thus far he hasn't answered any of my queries on the subject."
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One might argue that a woman would care more than a man about an author's reluctance to venture into emotional terrain, and Epstein, seeming to intuit that his own experience isn't enough to build a book around, includes a chapter in the middle that attempts to tackle women's friendships. Here he interrupts his quoting of Paul Valéry and Jonathan Swift to offer observations from a newspaper columnist and "one sociological study." Unsurprisingly, it's the one place in the book where the arrow flies past the mark. He makes the awkward mistake of condescending through gallantry, suggesting that friendships between women are "somehow lighter, but also deeper" because they're "less rivalrous" (amazing for a man who knew Lillian Hellman), that women are "less status-minded" (has he seen "Desperate Housewives"?) and less aggressive in conversation (generally true of his generation; but has he ever heard Ann Coulter, who's part of mine?).
THIS book is not without humor or dish. Literary gossips will doubtless enjoy Epstein's account of having to choose between two feuding Chicago intellectuals, the novelist Saul Bellow and the sociologist Edward Shils (he chose the latter, who became his best friend), particularly when he mentions how the two sometimes used to call him back to back, ridiculing each other's tastes. And this book is not without poignancy, particularly when Epstein describes the friendships of his childhood and the bond between his parents. Late in the book, he recalls the moment when he asked his father how his mother's father, or Epstein's maternal grandfather, had died. His father replied that his father-in-law had committed suicide, but that he had never told his wife he knew. "What I found astonishing," Epstein says, "was, first, that my mother had never mentioned this prime fact of her life to him, her best friend, through their long marriage, and, second, that he never told her that the fact was known to him."
So Epstein, it seems, comes by his reticence and discretion honestly. What fine traits to have in a friend. What a shame they work less well in a narrator examining friendship.