Certainly they both write without shame. Perhaps if they actually knew each other they wouldn't have felt the need for quite so much mutual flattery: Freddie to Joe: "you are a man who, while striking no fancy attitudes, provokes excellence"; Joe to Freddie: "I happen to have derived much pleasure from you, your irony, your style, and your wit . . ."; Freddie on Freddie: "I write like a man who never wanted to do anything else much, except make love, of course, and a name, I guess . . ."; Joe on both: "If we may be said to have positions in the world, then, I like to think, the term anti-bullshitter describes these positions." About other writers, they talk with all the candour you would expect from a closed-doors conversation between old friends — i.e. they bring up other writers almost exclusively in order to disparage them, being cruel to minor figures and dismissive of major ones. Epstein's year-long crusade against Saul Bellow (Feb: "a narcissist"; April: "the fraudulence behind his literary enterprise . . . a prick"; June: "little-known in the city of his upbringing"; Aug: "downright unpleasant . . .[not] entirely convincing as novelist") is only the most eyebrow-raising example among dozens. He talks more than once about how "a large heart and sympathetic moral imagination" are the most important qualities in a writer, but himself has scarcely a kind word to say about anyone other than Midge Decter. 

Freddie's epistolary style is ultra-florid: he builds his sentences not so much out of words as out of mots, and if he can't think of a pun or cute allusion with which to express a given idea, he'll just slip it into one of the about eight other languages he knows. Here he is on — I'm 90 per cent certain — Julian Barnes: "Mr Skimpy Flashpot, words administered by dripper, French polish a specialty (can there be a speciousality? Hang about, as the Brits say), self-importance in a Gucci bag, Flaubert's sparrow." Got that? Joe, who gives the strong impression of having never set foot outside the city of Chicago, is the opposite. Though, like Freddie, he adores puns ("when Pushkin came to shovekin"; "the writing on the Wall St"), his style is functional: he says what he means and he means what he says, and he says it, and means it, over and over again. The book has been left unpolished — to preserve that authentic "correspondence feel" — and as one would expect is very repetitive. 

There are some nice things. At one point Raphael tosses out what could easily have been a fine short story, a beautiful anecdote about the confusion between the papers of two similarly named, deceased classicists. But what he, and Epstein, both accomplished literary men, have somehow failed to realise is that while a reader enters a book of posthumously published letters at his own risk, the invitation from the living author to come and look places a much greater burden on the quality (in all senses) of the material. And it's a burden under which their book collapses. One of its major themes is success, and the reputations of the authors themselves and of others; that they should be found talking at length about the prizes they're glad they haven't won because they were sullied by second-rate recipients, the corrupt elite journals that they're relieved to have only featured in once or not at all, the other authors who had a lot of sex because they were rich and famous, the other authors who got rich and famous by having a lot of sex — all this is entirely consistent with the vainglorious concept of the book itself.