A magazine I used to read once ran a competition for creative misprints. The prize went to a reader who transformed a stanza in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by adding a single letter to a single word; in the doctored version, the Mariner was compared to
one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful friend
Doth close behind him tread.
Ah yes, many of us will know what it is to be pursued by a frightful friend. Friendship can be a complicated phenomenon.
Few writers are better equipped to examine its complexities than Joseph Epstein. He has established himself, in both his essays and his stories, as a notably shrewd observer of men and manners, at once subtle and down to earth. His humor rests on a strong sense of how inconsistent people can be (and how comically consistent, too). He takes long views, but he is alert to short-term social change.
All these qualities are apparent in his new book, Friendship: An Exposé, but so is a more specific feeling for friendship itself. He is thoroughly at home with his subject—its gradations, its satisfactions, its paradoxes, its disappointments—and though he is widely read in the literature of friendship, from Aristotle and Montaigne to recent sociology, much of his best material draws on his own experience.
