Gossip - The Untrivial Pursuit - By Joseph Epstein - Book Review
Most of us scriveners feel obliged to call our books something catchy in the hope of impressing potential readers with how clever we are. Not so Joseph Epstein. "What's your book about?" "Gossip." "What's it called?" "Gossip." Epstein has repeatedly opted for titles with the generic ring of labels on the files he must have kept for his research: "Ambition," "Friendship," "Snobbery," "Envy." On the part of any other writer, this might be taken as a sign of laziness or exhaustion. But in Epstein's case, it seems a bold grab to own a great big subject, even — or especially — one on which the Almighty has had a tendency to dominate the conversation.
United Artists
Tony Curtis, left, and Burt Lancaster in the 1957 film "Sweet Smell of Success."
GOSSIP
The Untrivial Pursuit
By Joseph Epstein
242 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $ 25.
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Times Topic: Joseph Epstein
Gossip, in Epstein's definition, is "one party telling another what a third party doesn't want known." A clunky subtitle — "The Untrivial Pursuit" — calls attention to a premise that would seem to be self-evident: now that gossip looms so huge in public life, he contends, the "major rap" against it, "that it is trivial, is no longer the main thing to be said about it, if it ever was." As objections to gossip go, this one has been collecting dust for quite some time, and Epstein, by placing it front and center, seems to be justifying his choice of subject to the disapproving ghosts of his grandparents. By far the more likely case to be made against gossip at the start of the 21st century would be that it has become so invasive and ubiquitous.
All religions condemn gossip, and Judaism has gone so far as to declare it a sin: a sin to initiate it, to repeat it, to listen to it. Yahweh's position, then, is unequivocal. But Epstein is of two minds, and while he deplores the blight gossip has inflicted on our culture, he convincingly argues that it serves any number of worthwhile purposes, from the literary (Elizabeth Hardwick called it "character analysis") to the sociological (David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University, says it's important in regulating behavior and defining membership in a group). Ultimately, what makes Epstein such a congenial authority on the subject is that he relishes good gossip himself.
Much of the hearsay he uses as example will be familiar to anyone with access to a robust grapevine and the works of Kitty Kelley. Most items fall into familiar categories, among them: Sexual Proclivities of the Windsors, Unlikely Bedfellows, Funny Stuff That Happened to People Who Drank Too Much, Public Figures in the Closet, Heinous Acts Committed by Men of Illustrious Reputation. In the course of citing scuttlebutt to make his point, Epstein becomes, to his dismay, a purveyor of it. "There is still a thing called good taste, and I am reasonably sure that I have already outraged it several pages ago," he admits as early as Page 20. What was the alternative? He might have followed the example of Isabella Stewart Gardner — who, according to George Santayana, "spoke ill of no one" — and confined himself to the broad philosophical and moral issues that gossip raises, without naming names. But I think it's safe to say that Epstein has no more interest in writing that book than we do in reading it.
Wending its way through these pages is a procession of the rich, the famous, the infamous, the mighty and the fallen — and the people who have built careers talking about them. The parade route passes from ancient Greece to present-day America, with Alcibiades, Epstein's candidate for "the first great subject of public gossip," in the lead, followed at intervals by Lord Byron, Eugène Delacroix, Grover Cleveland, Cyril Connolly, Wallis Simpson, Ava Gardner, Aristotle and Jackie Onassis, Fidel Castro and Kathleen Tynan, Steve McQueen, Yul Brynner, Alfred Kazin, Annie Leibovitz, Lillian Ross, Elena Kagan. The cardinal rule here: If you're famous, you're fair game. Waving from the thrones atop their floats are the Duc de Saint-Simon, Walter Winchell, Barbara Walters and Tina Brown. As the rumors pile up, the effect, even when the details are astonishingly intimate, is oddly superficial and impersonal, as if the protagonists weren't our fellow travelers but stock characters in the story of our times.
Holly Brubach writes frequently for The Times.
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