Nine Chicago-based short stories combine wit and precision to probe the meaning of ambition by creating insightful characters with realistic struggles Jewish-American literature is alive and well in this fine collection of short stories (many previously published in Commentary ) by Chicago author Epstein. His subjects are second- and third-generation Jewish Americans: doctors, lawyers, college professors, students, businessmen, writers, intellectuals, underworld figures, and an assortment of modern-day "schlemiels." Whether striving to be exceptional through fame, fortune, power, or intellect--or content in their ordinariness--Epstein's characters find there is a price to be paid in terms of disaffection, alienation, and disillusionment. Epstein understands his city and its presence in the lives of his characters, and he takes the storyteller's delight in weaving a plot, with each person the center of a colorful universe. These are highly original stories told with pathos and humanity. The Goldin Boys is recommended for modern American literature collections. - Lesley Jorbin, Cleveland State Univ. Lib. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. Editor of The American Scholar and a prolific essayist (A Line Out for a Walk, p. 314, etc.), Epstein debuts in fiction with this collection of nine stories, almost all of them about middle-aged Jewish men who grew up in the West Rogers Park area of Chicago. Many of these competent pieces serve the ideological agenda of the magazine in which they first appeared, the neo-conservative Commentary. ``Marshal Wexler's Brilliant Career,'' from the point of view of an Allan Bloomish Univ. of Chicago professor, tells of a student who becomes a prominent radical-chic publisher and writer. It's bush-league Tom Wolfe, with an added Zionist twist. As in several stories here, Epstein proves to be a poor man's Saul Bellow--his talking heads spout a cultural conservatism that really, underneath, suggest a defense of vulgar ambition. A number of profiles here concern class difference among Jews, and reveal a parvenu's interest in snobbery. ``The Count and the Princess'' chronicles the unlikely passion of a snobbish Polish migr for a suburban divorce, a ``Jewess'' not at all of his style. Similarly, ``Kaplan's Big Deal'' finds a wealthy, unencumbered Chicago businessman pursuing a divorced prof because he loves and admires her well-mannered son. In a number of stories, lower-class, hard- working Jews tell of those who've arrived. In the not very subtly named title piece, the remarkably athletic sons of a wealthy lawyer and his glamorous wife eventually meet their downfall, and in ``Paula, Dinky, and the Shark,'' an accountant's wife surveys the lives of her best friend's family, gangsters she's known since youth. Epstein's high esteem for the self-made businessman is further revealed in ``Low Anxiety,'' in which an office-furniture dealer links his daughter's abortion to his sense of cultural decline. ``No Pulitzer for Pinsker'' and ``Another Rare Visit with Noah Danzig'' attack novelists for their duplicitous manipulations of reality. Epstein writes with sledge-hammer subtlety about characters already familiar from Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and even Richard Stern. A book of minor ethnic interest. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.