Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit
By Joseph Epstein
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 242 pages,
$25)
This gift-buying season is turning out to be a good one
for readers. Among many worthy titles, Joseph Epstein’s
Gossip, stands out.
For his regular readers, a new Epstein book is a
much-looked-forward-to event. For those who haven’t had the
pleasure, it’s an opportunity to sample from one of the nation’s
most entertaining writers and most acute observers of all precincts
of the Vanity Fair we call life.
As for the entertainment portion, no less a critic than
the late William F. Buckley Jr., in his review of Epstein’s 2002
book Snobbery, called Epstein “the wittiest writer alive.”
Now there’s a book blurb for the ages. Our Bill certainly knew
witty when he saw it, or, in Epstein’s case, read it.
Epstein previously, in books that instruct while they
entertain, has sorted Snobbery, Friendship, and
Envy. Now, to our advantage, he’s performed the same
service for “Gossip,” an often reviled but well-nigh universal
activity.
(Please, no groaning protestations that you aren’t
interested in gossip and certainly don’t engage in it. Of course
you are and do, as everyone is and does. Get over it.)
Despite secular and religious strictures against it
—Deuteronomy calls it “an abomination” — gossip is as wide-spread
and ineradicable as the shark or the cucaracha. It’s everywhere and
for all time because people take pleasure in it. Perhaps the main
reason the Garden of Eden just wouldn’t do as a permanent
arrangement is that there was no third person for Adam and Eve to
talk about. (OK, there was God, but talking about Him carried
risks.)
And talking about third persons, usually not to number
three’s advantage, is the essence of gossip, an activity that can
range from harmlessly amusing to vicious and damaging. Throughout
Epstein’s well-researched book, which parses gossip from the court
of Louis XIV (a viper’s nest, as most royal courts were) to the
contemporary supermarket checkout line, Epstein examines various
definitions of gossip but never settles on one. But as we learn,
gossip is far too multi-faceted — way too many forms of it, way
too many motivations for engaging in it — for one definition to
serve.
Gossipers can range from the harmless busybody, to those
just wishing to be in the know, all the way to the ambitious man or
women on a mission or with an axe to grind. In the corporate hive,
gossip may be the most reliable form of information available. And
universities, Epstein says, “are unimaginable without
gossip.”
In the contemporary 24-hour news cycle many
gossipers-for-hire are paid through a vocation known as journalism.
The distinction between gossip and news grows ever murkier. Epstein
treats this evolution in a chapter titled, “Whores of Information,”
Oscar’s Wilde’s jaundiced expression for reporters, and probably a
bit an exaggeration. But the honest reporter can hardly deny, as
Epstein puts it, that much of his job is to “spy and pry, to find
out things that people, for various reasons, would rather not have
revealed.” (For one with several hash marks in the reporting
service, I plead no contest.)
Epstein concedes his interest in gossip comes from the
fact that, for all the insincere objections to it from various
poseurs, he has always enjoyed it. In various “Diary” entries he
gives us examples of his own indulgence in the
form:
My own preference as a recipient of gossip is for items
that feature the comedy of human behavior, that is, of
people trying to live up to their own probably too
high pretentions. The best gossip for me
is that which confirms my own views of the
essential fraudulence of certain people, especially
people who present themselves as a touch — and usually more than a
touch — more moral than the rest of us.
Along with the history, the analysis, and the sheer fun of
the subject, Epstein also names names. He gives
details of some of the more famous gossip, fair and foul, about the
famous. So that it will be Epstein’s phone ringing and not mine,
I’ll not repeat the names, but Gossip readers may well be
as entertained as I was to learn that a certain, now departed,
historical figure was said to be “the best fellatrix in
Europe.”
The erudite but accessible, serious but not solemn tone of
Gossip is that which readers encounter in Epstein’s essay
collections — A Line Out for a Walk, Once More Around
the Block, Narcissus Leaves the Pool, In a
Cardboard Belt — and in his three fine short story
collections. As always, the Epstein humor is in full
view.
So we may add gossip to the list of subjects that can be
leaden in the hands of sociologists, professors, and other
credentialed bores, but magic in the hands of a writer like
Epstein, gifted in sifting the rich and amusing place our world
is.
But all of this is just between you and me. Don’t breathe
a word of it.
