About Schmidt - Louis Begley [0]
Begley has created a terribly funny, touching, infuriating and complex character…. [He] uses his intimate attunement to the language, habits and assumptions of the upper classes to reveal the tiny cracks in the system and to excavate the subtle cruelties and disarray that lie quietly beneath the surface.”
—Los Angeles Times
“Albert Schmidt is another of Begley’s brilliant impostors, though this time an impostor unaware of his own charade…. With icy, eerie brilliance [and] by blinding his flawed hero, Begley has painted an indelible portrait of a man with a hole where his soul should be.”
—Newsday
“Witty … Begley has a flair for lies…. The book’s cultivated, assured tone makes its flashes of bitterness and anger all the more striking.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A remarkably fine novel … [Begley] has written a subtle novel and accomplished it with exquisite skill.”
—Newark Star Ledger
“[A] tart and stylish book … Having successfully portrayed outsiders in his previous works, he has taken on the consummate insider and treated him with grace and understanding.”
—Library Journal
“An elegant, precise, full novel about a lawyer’s startling transformation … A sly, sharp portrait of an amoral but appealing figure, and of the declining world of privilege that has shaped him.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A powerful story of a man’s fall from grace.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
By Louis Begley
WARTIME LIES
THE MAN WHO WAS LATE
AS MAX SAW IT
MISTLER’S EXIT
SCHMIDT DELIVERED
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
A Reader’s Quide
About the Author
Copyright
For P., A., and A.
Già che spendo i miei danari,
Io mi voglio divertir.
—DON GIOVANNI
I
SCHMIDT’S WIFE had not been dead more than six months when his only child, Charlotte, told him she had decided to get married. He was finishing breakfast at the kitchen table. The “Metropolitan” section of the Times was in his left hand; as on every Saturday, he had been poring over the mutual fund quotation table to check the prices of two investments, one in small capitalization companies and the other in international equities, both of which he had bought on his own initiative, out of conviction, and had come to regard, irrationally, because the rest of his money was managed with reasonable success by a professional whom he left quite alone, also out of conviction, as the weather vane of his financial standing. The small capitalization fund was down, by ten cents. He thought that made it a loss of about fifty cents for the week. The international stocks were down too. He put aside the paper, looked at his daughter, so tall and, it seemed to him, painfully desirable in her sweat-soaked running clothes, said I am very happy for you, when will it be? and began to cry. He had not cried since the afternoon when the specialist confirmed the advice he had previously given to him over the telephone: Don’t think of an operation, why mutilate Mary, it won’t give her even one good year, we’ll keep her as comfortable as possible. Meanwhile, you two try to have a good time. He held Mary’s hand until they were out in the street.
The morning sunlight was blinding. He put Mary into a taxi—ordinarily, she would have walked home, but he saw that she was shaken, almost disoriented—caught one himself, proceeded to the office, told his secretary he didn’t want to be disturbed, shut the door, called David Kendall, the family doctor who was also their friend, heard that he and the specialist had discussed the advice before it was given, and, lying facedown on the couch, wept like a boy, the parade of his life with Mary passing on the screen of his burning eyelids like some refurbished newsreel. That day he had been mourning the end of his happiness. But today