[In the following excerpted review, Dirda commends stylistic aspects of the essays in With My Trousers Rolled.]

Essays, nowadays, nearly always come disguised as something else. They may be reviews of books or introductions to them; magazine articles or newspaper columns; literary travel pieces, personal memoirs, New Yorker profiles or “casuals”; even some of the more old-fashioned forms of cultural criticism. At heart most of this occasional writing secretly aspires to the permanence of hardcovers—and to a subtitle that proclaims “selected prose” or “literary essays.”

Paradoxically, however, the authors of these august-sounding collections always remain journalists, critics, scholars, nature writers, scientists and poets. Nobody inks in “essayist” on his or her passport. Demand that educated readers name a living American essayist and those who don't look poleaxed will probably all stammer “Joseph Epstein.”

With My Trousers Rolled is Epstein's fifth compilation of his “familiar essays” and, like its predecessors, offers some of the most civilized entertainment this side of the Kennedy Center. What makes an Epstein piece so good? Mainly its sound, the wry humor with which its author looks at himself and the world. While his syntax remains plain and clear, Epstein's diction cavorts between the high style and the low, zigzags from scholarly quotation to slightly outmoded slang, undercuts the possibly pretentious with the appealingly personal. Epstein likes being a serious reader of serious books—these pieces first appeared in the American Scholar—but he also considers himself something of a regular guy, disdainful of phonies and zealots, an admirer of the slick, the professional and the moderately raffish.

In this current batch of his reflections Epstein takes up cars, pets, beards and hair styles, fame, music, the decline in the quality of American life, and his mother (who during her lifetime read virtually none of her son's published work). One of the particular delights of these pages arises from Epstein's real flair for metaphor and analogy. Here, for instance, is our man on his cat:

I hope that I have not given the impression that Isabelle is a genius among cats, for it is not so. If cats had IQs, hers, my guess is, would fall somewhere in the middle range; if cats took SATs, we should have to look for a small school somewhere in the Middle West for her where discipline is not emphasized.

When Epstein isn't zinging you with his similes, he's charming you with his quotations. We learn, for example, that Edith Wharton once described a cat as “a snake in furs.” In a single sentence he can mix Yiddish humor, literary allusion and a neat pun: “Conscience, remorse, heavy and even self-invented guilt—ah, now we are coming into my country—the country, to misappropriate Sarah Orne Jewett's famous title, of the pointed fingers.” In this same piece—on writing habits—Epstein tells us that he tries to compose between 800 and 1,200 words a day. “On those rare days when I have been able to write two thousand or so such words, I am so deliriously smug that I am really quite unfit to speak even to myself.”

Where some essayists might perceive the human condition as a disease or a bitter joke, Epstein tends to regard it as a hokey, vulgar and yet strangely affecting Memorial Day parade in a small Indiana town. Of any of his essays one might say, as he does of a minor piece of music: “It was too brief, but what there was of it, was, to use an elevated critical term, swell.”