The Standard Reader

McMurtry has ransacked the historical cast of the period, including Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Tom Fitzgerald, the Sublette brothers, Toussaint Charbonneau, the husband of Sacagawea, and their son, Baptiste or “Pomp,” born on the Lewis and Clark expedition. From the gentleman-adventurers of the Old World, he has plucked William Drummond Stewart and Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied. All of these, plus artist George Catlin and several dozen Indians are dragged into the narrative.

The story relates the improbable marriage of the utterly unsocialized Jim Snow (the “Sin Killer” of the first volume’s title) and the uninhibited Lady Tasmin Berrybender. The “Wandering Hill” is from an Indian legend of a migrating hill populated by devils, an encounter with which usually signifies death. The Berrybenders et al. are wintering at a remote trading post. There’s a good deal of gab, mountain-man reminiscences, and frequent he-ing and she-ing–a routine carnality seems to be the author’s conception of the naturalism of those days–to further McMurtry’s often-expressed intent of demythologizing the westering experience. The priapic Lord Berrybender sets an exhausting cadence.

This is less a novel than a literary romp. It has its moments: The buffalo stampede is as vividly drawn as one would expect from the author. But the characters are cartoonish and the dialogue stilted. Even admirers of McMurtry may find the yarn to be like some Western rivers: too thick to drink, too thin to plow.

–Woody West

Tales from the Left Coast: True Stories of Hollywood Stars and Their Outrageous Politics by James Hirsen (Crown Forum, 314 pp., $25.95). Whether they want to cure a rare disease, take away Americans’ guns, or save the chickens, left-wing advocacy groups love the support they get from entertainment celebrities. In “Tales from the Left Coast,” keyboard-player-turned-law-professor James Hirsen offers a catalogue of Hollywood idiocy. (Hirsen may not have done all the writing himself: NewsMax.com, a conservative news site where Hirsen writes a column, is credited as the co-author, whatever that means.)

From stories of Alec Baldwin’s animal advocacy to Oliver Stone’s Castro toadying, Hirsen provides ammunition for those who see Hollywood as a wretched hive of leftist villainy. And he’s right that many entertainers, with their half-informed agitation for dubious causes, have proven their political stupidity. But Hirsen doesn’t know where to stop. While it’s useful to attack suicidal pacifists, cocaine snorters who campaign against nicotine cigarettes, and smut peddlers who coddle puritanical Communist dictators, Hirsen can’t admit that politically active left-wing celebrities ever have a point. Julia Roberts’s work on behalf of girls with Rhett syndrome and Bono’s tireless, wonkish advocacy on third-world debt get treated with the same offhand disdain as Michael Moore’s inane prattling.

Hirsen’s writing–with its exclamation marks, rhetorical questions, and anonymous sources–also leaves a lot to be desired. The book offers no logical chain of argument or suggestions for improving matters. For a supposed insider, furthermore, Hirsen has precious little dirt to dish: Almost nothing in this book will come as news to anyone who reads a newspaper. The idea behind “Tales from the Left Coast” is worthwhile. The book isn’t.

–Eli Lehrer

Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance by Peter H. Schuck (Belknap, 444 pp., $35). Casting a critical eye over American society, Yale law professor Peter Schuck makes the case that government and the law are mortal enemies of true diversity. Diversity of all types–from religious to racial to culinary–runs rampant, but the focus of post-1960s “official” diversification on race and ethnicity threatens to wipe out not just such principles as equal treatment, but also naturally occurring types of diversity. Schuck offers the example of affirmative action. An attempt to diversify a university faculty by race or gender will likely compromise political and ideological diversity.

On immigration policy, lawmakers have compromised the national interest for diversity’s sake. Though Congress did the right thing in 1965 by rewriting immigration law to be more welcoming to those not of European heritage, clarifications after that year deserve less than high praise. In the 1980s, Congress began developing a “diversity visa” lottery, which it has since expanded, to allow those adversely impacted by the 1965 law opportunities for entry. One claim to notoriety the diversity lottery has under its belt is allowing in the Egyptian terrorist who killed two people at the Los Angeles airport last year.

Schuck recommends the program be scrapped, its 50,000 visas distributed each year among those on traditional immigration paths involving family ties or job skills: “No convincing conception of justice demands…that this precious asset should simply be given away at random and without reference to any benefits for American society.” The idea of merit is involved when the average person rejects the notion that government should thirst after specific kinds of diversity.

“In short,” Schuck concludes, “diversity’s value to people depends on its perceived genuineness and lack of legal contrivance. This in turn depends on where it came from, how it came about, and the process that produced it.”

–Beth Henary

Book of the Week

Our Beerbohm: Joseph Epstein’s fabulous small stories.

By Jody Bottum

“Fabulous Small Jews” by Joseph Epstein (Houghton Mifflin, 340 pp., $24). In literature, as in baseball, an era of long-ball hitters–or would-be long-ball hitters, swinging for the fences on every pitch–doesn’t know how to appreciate elegance in the game. Have you ever seen Adam Dunn standing at the plate? Or read the Paris Review? This season, Dunn has hit 25 home runs for the Cincinnati Reds, while costing them 100 strikeouts and a .203 batting average. And the Paris Review–well, they’re not publishing Joseph Epstein’s fiction.

A contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Epstein is best known for his personal and familiar essays, which is a little like saying Babe Ruth is best known for his sports career. When Epstein writes the kind of essays collected in the 1999 “Narcissus Leaves the Pool,” or last year’s bestselling book-length essay “Snobbery,” or this fall’s forthcoming volume “Envy” (in a series of slim volumes on the seven deadly sins), he makes you forget that anyone else ever played the game. I’d cheerfully sacrifice, if not quite my mother, then at least one or two of my aunts on the altar of the gods of style, if that’s what it took to write with his combination of learning, comic self-observation, and–the inevitable word when speaking of Epstein–elegance. You imagine Max Beerbohm would be like this, if Beerbohm happened to have been a midwestern American with a deep knowledge of Chicago’s sports teams, Chicago’s streets, and Chicago’s Jews.

But there are observations writers want to make–places that writing wants to go–that the essay simply doesn’t accommodate, and for some years Joseph Epstein has been publishing short stories in Commentary and the Hudson Review. The recent ones have now been collected in a volume called Fabulous Small Jews. The title is from a poem of Karl Shapiro’s, but there’s something about it that seems to demand pronouncing the first word FAH-bulous–if only because Epstein aims, in story after story, at capturing the fabulous character of small Jewish characters. It’s not exactly that his characters have necessarily lived small lives, but the stories show them in small slices, precisely observed.

That’s sometimes a little cruel. “Postcards,” for instance, is a comic story of a man who writes pseudonymous letters of insult to famous authors and finally gets caught by a woman novelist. But a brief mention, toward the end, of Hefferman’s having straightened up his apartment, before he met the woman–on the off-chance he “might even get lucky”–reminds the reader a little of George Bernard Shaw’s claim that H.G. Wells observed his characters in the same appreciative spirit that a butcher eyes a pig.

But that kind of cruel precision is one of the places the essay doesn’t want to go. A kind of wry wisdom about human foibles, too, is more properly the province of fiction than nonfiction prose. With stories in “Fabulous Small Jews” like (my two favorites) “Artie Glick in a Family Way” and “The Master’s Ring,” Joseph Epstein has brought to fiction his trademark learning, wit, and, yes, elegance.