Friendship: An Expose

Another perfect book by Epstein
Love his writing style. Love all of his books !

Raises questions, leaves some hanging
If, as Joseph Epstein writes, friendship can rest on nothing more or less than liking someone enough to see him again, one wonders how he can elsewhere say that spouses or romantically engaged people aren’t really friends, at least in the early days of their relationship. I’m sure this is true for many people (who may in fact never be good friends and require other supports), but it is certainly not true for the rest of us. Early married friendship as friendship may have its deficiencies, but surely those deficiencies vary in number and gravity with each couple; and on his own showing, friendship itself has deficiencies. Aiming too high or asking too much may mean that one doesn’t have friends at all.
But that raises another question: is friendship a thing in itself, with standards or criteria that must be met in order to be friendship, or is it something that we can squeeze and shape and reduce as opportunity or lack thereof requires, a sort of Procrustean thing? In other words, friendship may be swell, but maybe the real thing is just rare, and no amount of longing can make it less rare.
An interesting question, also (for me at least), is how Epstein’s friends have received this book. Epstein makes it clear, in different places, that he has more friends than he really wants; he is someone presented with a huge chocolate box of friends, but he really only likes the hazelnut ones, and then even these must have hard centers. All his friends must be wondering: am I the hazelnut with the hard center or the mint one he could do without? And if so, can I do without him? He may be the only person in history that has written a book not to make more friends but to have fewer.
So, if Epstein is unlike most people in that instead of wishing that he had the right sort of friends, or real friends, or more friends, he is not very needy of friends, does he shed light on what gives a person that lack of neediness? Not directly; but it seems as if some of the very qualities that make one a good friend are the same qualities that make one not very needy of friends. An interesting paradox, perhaps, pointing to quality over quantity.
Further, Epstein’s self-described ability to draw people to him, and to flatter them that he likes them more than he does (a revelation that itself is very unflattering), raises the question of why, other than vanity, he has persisted in the same behavior for so long. If (at least before publishing this book) he has ever answered the phone and smiled down it audibly, as customer service people are sometimes trained to do, did he genuinely smile in each case or did he know that he was doing his customer-service thing, his people-love-me-because-I’m-so-lovable thing? I’m not saying this to “go after” him, but these questions come up in the course of reading his book. In other words, can one really have “a lot” of friends, however defined and whatever the number, if one doesn’t really want them? Expose, indeed.

I laughed out loud at some excellent examples of his humor
This is a well researched concept looked at from many perspectives, along with the writer’s own experience in these matters. It is the writer’s perspective that rounds this volume out. Epstein’s skill at communicating his points is formidable, and his little glimpses of humor, absolutely delightful. I laughed out loud at some excellent examples of his humor, but perhaps even more important, is that I found wisdom and depth in what he had to say.

Outstanding
Thoughtful, entertaining, provocative. Fine writing by Epstein. I find myself mystified by those people who provided harshly negative reviews.