Olympian detachment is harder than wholehearted attachment to one's particular follies, and I was more expecting an accurate view from Epstein's vantage, whatever that turned out to be; most books on snobbery do this, of course, and it's sometimes insightful and sometimes informative and sometimes entertaining, like the cultural sections of the Economist. Some people defend their particular snobberies well enough to be convincingly educational, although the more convincing they are the less it seems like snobbery; Knuth's Literate Programming is borderline for me, so I can see it both ways. (Easier when the judgment is aimed at works, not directly at people.) But - possibly hamstrung by its desire to be Olympian - this Snobbery waffles between admiring the things it admires and defending the less-stylish perfectly pleasant achievement Epstein actually lives with. Sometimes he emits a little spurt of vitriol at the more-fashionable - Haryard, Yale, and Princeton as one overrated mass; all of San Francisco; dieting. I didn't think he was very funny about any of them, though. It's normally difficult not to make pretensions funny - all you have to do is describe them clearly enough to lay the pretense bare - but he doesn't describe much, certainly nothing more recent than Paul Fussell's Class, which was mostly descriptive and a bit vituperative, or Bad, which reversed the proportions. Epstein doesn't seem to know much about anything less than thirty years old (he must be at least in his sixties), and makes claims about the immunity of science and technology to snobbery that are unintentionally quite funny: "computer-made entrepreneurs -- seem uninterested in qualifying: ... social prestige in any form thus far known holds ... little magic for them."
Where he sticks to his autobiography, the book is better because it does know something, so the analysis and vitriol are honest. The best description is of what it was like to be Jewish as Jews broke into the WASP power structure; this is also where he puts a bit of vitriol of surprising nastiness. The one piece of anti-Semitism he describes most clearly had no evidence, as he also says - he was afraid a WASP tennis-player was going to be rude to him, and the tennis-player wasn't - and yet he identifies this man, almost certainly dead and unable to defend himself, by city and name. Tacky. He could have been perfectly clear about how real the intimidation felt without tarring someone.
If you feel like seeing the anthill of the moment laid bare, read Kurt
Anderson's Turn of the Century instead. Anderson was
nearer the fashion centers of New York, and did a fair job of
describing the oddities of Silicon Valley and Redmond. I don't think he
always deduced correctly what the unfamiliar status symbols meant to
their users, but it seemed like a fair try. Snobbery
would probably be useful if you want to know what impresses the
humanities departments at the U. of Chicago or Northwestern, but
anything by Allan Bloom would probably do better.
So wrote clew in
History (20th c.).