In trying to make sense of Epstein’s career, it’s hard not to be reminded of one of the greatest of American novels, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Pynchon was obsessed with the covert system formed in wartime that merged deceptive public goals with private ambitions and corporate agendas. At one point, the narrator of Gravity’s Rainbow reflects on how war allows traffickers of all sorts—in luxury goods, in sex work, in refugees—to thrive: “Don’t forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals…. The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets, carefully styled ‘black’ by the professionals, spring up everywhere.” Epstein flourished in the shadows of those organic markets.

«Country for miles around gone to necropolis, gray with marble dust, dust that was the breaths, the ghosts, of all those fake-Athenian monuments going up elsewhere across the Republic. Always elsewhere.»

“I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different someday—that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive. . . .”

(joke): All great works of art are detective stories.