Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit by Joseph Epstein

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25)

Once upon a time, gossip was a “nasty but rare treat,” said Boris Kachka in New York. Not anymore, says Joseph Epstein. In his witty new book about the ways we chatter about others, the conservative essayist, who has produced previous books about snobbery and envy, bemoans not gossip’s ubiquity but the current nature of its ubiquity. Epstein freely professes his love for gossip, even engaging in his fair share of it here. But in examining the history of rumormongering from the ancient Greeks to Kim Kardashian, he seems saddened most because he senses that fewer and fewer secrets are held as the exclusive property of social insiders. “There’s surely some snobbery” in that complaint.

But one can’t worry much about conclusions when reading Epstein, said Henry Allen in The Wall Street Journal. “Like a good stand-up comedian,” the erudite septuagenarian “inspires confidence but also a sense of anxiety that he’s making it up as he goes along.” Try as he might, he never even arrives at a concise definition of gossip, yet he fails “so wittily and gracefully that one hardly notices.” Which is not to say he’s polite. “Epstein has the gift of turning cruelty into entertainment,” and he’s not above dishing on the alleged sexual habits of Jackie Kennedy, Susan Sontag, J. Edgar Hoover, or Princess Diana.

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Put aside the book’s “tired narrative” about cultural decline, and Epstein mostly champions gossip, said Isaac Chotiner in Slate.com. Anyone who possesses no interest in gossip, he writes, is “wanting in curiosity” and “uninterested in the variousness of human nature.” Sure, gossip can spring from “the wish to harm someone else’s reputation.” But the motive can also be constructive, said Allison Yarrow in TheDailyBeast.com. To Epstein, the core function of gossip is to enforce moral norms. For most of us, “simply the threat of chatter is enough to prevent bad behavior.” Research also suggests that speaking behind others’ backs “can enhance psychological well-being.” So don’t feel guilty the next time you gossip. Epstein would say that you might actually be doing good.