The Norton Book of Personal Essays

In his introduction, Epstein contends that ""whatever the ostensible subject of a personal essay, at bottom the true subject is the author of the essay."" Maybe so, but the degree to which this is true varies greatly in this 53-piece collection. Mark Twain's confessions of faking his way through Italian, Truman Capote's rhapsodic recollections about Tangier (""hemmed with hills, confronted by the sea, and looking like a white cape draped on the shores of Africa"") and Annie Dillard's account of an encounter with a weasel show the writers to be, respectively, amusing, passionate and thought-provoking. But personally speaking, those essays aren't on the same level as Eudora Welty's memories of childhood excursions to the neighborhood store, Rebecca West's engrossing tracing of her desire to ""contemplate character"" to an adolescent visit with her boorish godmother and John Gregory Dunne's touching piece about his daughter. Anyone expecting an anthology devoted to personal confessions and intimate glimpses into lives of their authors is bound to be disappointed by Epstein's occasionally off- track selection. He certainly knows what makes a good essay, being himself a fine essayist (With My Trousers Rolled, etc.), but he is also editor of the American Scholar and drew a disproportionate number of the more expository entries (five) from that publication. (Feb.)