With my trousers rolled

Over the last twenty years Joseph Epstein has published more than eighty familiar essays. Taken together, these essays constitute a continuing autobiography. Although the tone in this collection, his fifth - which owes its title to T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" - is still highly amused, these new essays also strike a chord that's slightly elegiac. Offering reflections on his increased maturity both as a writer and as a man, Epstein admits to feeling more and more on the periphery of contemporary life - "Nicely Out of It," and not at all minding this. "Decline and Blumenthal" is his take on the endemic slippage of standards in all realms of life. In "Here to Buy Mink," he conveys his love and admiration for the remarkable woman who was his mother. . Other essays deal with the pleasures of middle age, of music and cats and telling anecdotes, of the psychological and social complexities of car ownership, of the oddities and ambiguities of male hair. Urbane yet regularly amazed, ironic yet happily candid, Epstein's essays have long been compared to the conversation of an intelligent friend whose wit takes surprising turns of seriousness. Epstein is one of those writers whose humor, at bottom, is serious.