About Schmidt

by Louis Begley Narrated by George Guidall

Overview

Louis Begley's perceptive novel hums with emotional energy and shimmers with haunting images. A National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist, About Schmidt is a powerful meditation on loneliness, desire, and transformation. Old-school lawyer Albert Schmidt has spent years carefully climbing the ladder of success. But now, at what should be the pinnacle of his career, his life is in chaos. Within months, he is widowed and forcibly retired from his firm. He harbors painfully mixed feelings about his ambitious daughter's impending marriage. Suddenly, in the midst of this turmoil, a seductive young woman asks Smitty what he wants. Far from being a time of satisfaction and complacency, the middle age encountered by Begley's hero is the beginning of a new journey tantalizing, yet unnerving. From the first step, Begley draws the reader deeply into a man's quest for new ways to understand an unstable world.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Both Auchincloss's sophisticated comedies of WASP manners and the terrain mapped in Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day come to mind as comparisons for Begley's new novel, but his discerning intellect and lapidary prose distinguish this powerful story of a man whose fall from grace has a double-edged irony. Albert Schmidt retired from his job in a white-shoe New York law office during his wife's terminal illness. In his 60s, he lives in her magnificent family home in the exclusive Long Island community of Bridgehampton, where he makes sardonic observations about those who betray his archaic values and rigid social standards. The most egregious traitor is his beautiful, brilliant (i.e., Harvard summa cum laude) daughter, Charlotte, whose decision to marry a blatantly ambitious Jewish lawyer is a bitter blow to Schmidtalthough he remains outwardly civil. Schmidt has no idea that his cool, remote behavior has alienated Charlotte, that she is aware of the veiled anti-Semitism he himself denies and that her new family, which Schmidt thinks vulgar, offers the warmth and human contact he has never provided. With sublime, delicious irony, Begley shows Schmidt's bizarre metamorphosis from a pillar of rectitude to a silly old fool; a Puerto Rican waitress younger than Charlotte is the instrument of Schmidt's descent down the primrose path. Taking advantage of Schmidt's loneliness, streetwise Carrie uses her sexual wiles to move herself and her drug-dealing boyfriend into his house and life. Begley guides the narrative with smooth aplomb and dry humor, providing a wealth of acutely observed social detail and a clear depiction of emotional dysfunction. Though his classic Holocaust novel, Wartime Lies, is a standard Begley can't improve upon, this elegant, sophisticated novel is another study in self-deception that confirms his reputation as a masterful literary novelist. (Sept.)

Library Journal

Once a highly successful lawyer of the old school, married to a topnotch book editor whom he loves deeply, Albert Schmidt is in the process of losing it all. His wife has died, he has left his firm early to cope with his loss, and his only daughter is now marrying a man whom he considers crass and graspingand who is, unaccountably, Jewish. Writing in fine form, Begley (As Max Saw It, LJ 4/1/96) achieves an extraordinary balance in this tart and stylish book. Perhaps Schmidtie was at times a distant father, an unfaithful husband, even a touch anti-Semitic (an issue which Jewish author Begley treats with great sensitivity)but he's still getting a rotten deal from his self-absorbed Yuppie daughter, who is quickly deserting him for her fianc's family. "Since I am not dead yet I don't think you'll get Mom's and my silver just now," he responds to one thoughtless request, and he soon takes up with a young Puerto Rican waitress who is far more vibrant and devoted than his stuffy offspring. Making us side with the flawed and prickly Schmidt is no mean feat, and Begley is to be commended. Having successfully portrayed outsiders in his previous works, he has taken on the consummate insider and treated him with grace and understanding. Essential.Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Kirkus Reviews

An elegant, precise, droll novel about a lawyer's startling transformation, by the author of Wartime Lies (1991) and The Man Who Was Late (1993).

A recent widower (he and his wife Mary had seemed to exemplify the old New York ideal of elegance and accomplishment), retired at the age of 60 from his law firm, Schmidt, seemingly a poster boy for the now fading world of the cultured, wealthy WASP, is vaguely melancholy, faintly discontented, stranded in his wife's handsome beachfront house in Bridgehampton. His self-involved daughter Charlotte (a devoted member of the public relations department of a tobacco company) announces her intention to marry Jon Riker, a humorless lawyer from Schmidt's firm. Schmidt, who had built a very lucrative legal career on his ability to be "always demonstrably and impeccably right," begins to feel the first stirrings of self- doubt. Does he object to Riker because he seems so one-dimensional, or because he's Jewish? And, with some amazement, he finds himself beginning an affair with a frank, exuberant waitress, a woman younger than his daughter. As Schmidt attempts to navigate increasingly turbulent waters (an outraged daughter, friends amused or appalled by his indiscretion), Begley deftly introduces long hidden pieces of Schmidt's former life. He was, it turns out, a tireless womanizer and a less-than-devoted dad. He's charmingly condescending toward those unlucky enough to be neither WASPS nor wealthy. He is, in fact, a bit of a cad. But it's one of the pleasures of Begley's increasingly dark narrative that he both reveals Schmidt's self-satisfied shortcomings and makes him nonetheless a fascinating character. And, as Schmidt faces a series of alarming problems (including his young lover's peculiar and softly menacing boyfriend), it's hard not to root for his success, for his newly aroused pleasure in life.

A sly, sharp portrait of an amoral but appealing figure, and of the declining world of privilege that has shaped him.

From the Publisher

"Novels are supposed to tell something about the real world, but in most novels about the upper classes money figures only in the decor, the things that money can buy. Begley's books have the great virtue of knowing about money itself, how it's acquired and kept.... Begley's previous books gravitated rather anxiously toward Europe, which was seen as the source both of any satisfactory culture and of appalling historical and personal tragedy. About Schmidt turns toward America and the present, exchanging an interest in suffering and failure, with its dangerous possibilities of self-magnification, for comic romance, with its emphasis not on finality but on life going on anyway."

—The New York Review of Books


"Albert Schmidt is another of Begley's brilliant impostors, though this time an impostor unaware of his charade. He is the cultivated man—out of
Harvard, no less—unable to acknowledge his subtle strain of
Jew-hating.... About Schmidt amounts to an intriguing about-face for
Begley.... By blinding his flawed hero, Begley has painted an indelible portrait of a man with a hole where his soul should be."

—Newsday


"What emerges... is a poignant study of aging centered on a man whose flaws become both sinister and sympathetic. In an era of encroaching coarseness, where civility dissolves... Schmidt summons in us remembrance of elegance past.... Is he a cultured patrician, a supercilious snob or both? Whichever he is, Begley succeeds wonderfully in making us care."

—San Francisco Chronicle


"Consistently subtle and intelligent, this novel ends by getting under your skin despite the unlikability of its protagonist. You are left with the feeling of having found out the complex truth behind the impeccable facade of someone you might never notice if you met him at a party."

—The New York Times Book Review


"If the sorrows of old 'Schmidtie' strike us as somewhat short of fully tragic, less than deeply moving, it's clearly intentional; Begley means for us to keep our distance—to withhold our sympathies—from his smug,
officious hero.... It's this that makes Begley's novel most interesting and nervy."

—Washington Post/Book World


"In the end, Begley has created a terribly funny, touching, infuriating and complex character in Schmidt, whose self-deceptions and imprisonment by his own world-view stand not only as a devastating portrait of a disappearing world but also sound a strangely evocative cautionary tale."

—Los Angeles Times Book Review


"In what could be called a novel of bad manners, Begley again demonstrates that he can reveal the complexities of society and personality with a clear eye and graceful style. Schmidt may not live up to today's strict standards of political correctness, but he more than meets the requirements of convincing fiction."

—Time

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169272925
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	01/21/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Decidedly, there was nothing wrong with Jon Riker. Schmidt had invited him to dinner one night--along with a group of other associates and two investment officers of a Hartford insurance company they all serviced--without in the least imagining that Charlotte would find him remarkably attractive. In fact he was surprised at her turning up, after Mary had warned her that the party would be business entertainment, one of those rank-has-its-obligations affairs older partners have to suffer through once in a while to make the hardworking young fry feel appreciated. But the next morning Charlotte said she was glad she had come. She thought Jon looked like Sam Waterston; that was her pronouncement, enough for Schmidt to get the picture. She had graduated from Harvard the previous year and was still living at home. The time to say what he really thought about Jon as his daughter's prospective beau was then, or over the course of the next few weeks. But he never told them--either Charlotte or Mary. He gave them only his office point of view: an excellent young lawyer, almost certain to become partner, except that he works much too hard. How will he find time to take Charlotte to the movies, never mind movies and dinner! Schmidt had behaved with decent consistency, of which he was rather proud, just as he would later, when he became Riker's principal, probably indispensable, supporter for partnership. Luckily for Riker, that process took place, and was concluded favorably for him, before he began sleeping with Charlotte; anyway before the word had gotten around or Mary had opened Schmidt's eyes, so that the firm did not need to face the dreaded question of whether the rule againstnepotism was about to be breached.

But even if Charlotte had not just informed him that she and Jon had made their decision--now that he thought of it, couldn't Riker have gone to the trouble of coming to Charlotte's father to ask for her hand?--and it weren't too ridiculously late to speak to Charlotte with the utmost candor, there was still nothing he could say against Riker, or, more precisely, against the marriage, that wouldn't seem to her, and perhaps even to him, once the words were out of his mouth, quirky, possessive, smacking of jealousy or envy. What could he say beyond admitting that, outside the office, he didn't care all that much for the qualities that in time would make Riker such a useful, reliable partner in that beloved firm--which Schmidt was coming to realize he missed principally as a source of income and porous barrier against self-doubt--and that surely weren't the qualities he had hoped to find in a son-in-law? According to an Arab proverb that one of his partners with oil-rich Middle Eastern clients had assured him was genuine, a son-in-law is like a pebble, only worse, because you can't shake him out of your shoe. Schmidt knew that the Romans, on the contrary, had prized these intruders. If one really loved a woman, one loved her the way a man loved his sons and his sons-in- law. Since he regretted not having sons--at work, he had had a tendency to develop a strong affection for the best of the young men who worked with him, a feeling that was generally reciprocated until the associate he had singled out as his right hand and object of loyalty became a partner and no longer needed a father figure in the firm--he had hoped to have Roman feelings for the man who married Charlotte. But how was he to bestow them on Jon Riker?

The stuff he had written about Riker, with considerable eloquence, in the critiques that, according to office procedures, followed the completion of each important assignment, was true enough: with variations appropriate to the occasion, it was like what he had told Charlotte and Mary and what became, in due course, the necessary mantra of slogans he repeated wearily at firm meetings when Jon came up for partnership. These slogans were not contradicted by Riker's other attributes, which Schmidt liked less but hadn't felt compelled to mention because they had little to do with the criteria according to which his partners judged candidates. For instance, the narrowness of that strong intelligence: What did his future son-in-law think about, apart from client matters and deadlines and the ebb and tide of bankruptcy litigation (Jon's annoying specialty, the domain of loudmouth, overweight, and overdressed lawyers, thank God Jon didn't look or sound like them), spectator sports, and the financial aspects of existence?

Jon's talk about finances was sort of a mantra too, one that Jon repeated and Schmidt despised. After his clerkship, should Jon have taken a job with a firm that paid associates more than Wood & King did? How should he evaluate the loss of income resulting from his choice, if there had been one, against the possibly lower probability of partnership at some other more lucrative place--but had he "made partner" there, what a bonanza! Now that he was a Wood & King partner, was his generation's share of income sufficient (here the pocket calculator might come out of the neatly organized attache; case, Charlotte's lavish offering), or was too much going to older types (like Schmidt, but that was left unsaid), who had not had the decency to get out when their productivity declined? Should he buy an apartment or continue to rent, was it to be a condo or a co-op, how much would it cost him to be married if Charlotte stopped working, what price tag to put on each child? The evidence of Jon's having read a book since the first volume of Kissinger's memoirs, Mary's Christmas present, was lacking. On long airplane trips, of which Jon took many, Schmidt had noticed that Jon did his "homework"--an honorable enough occupation--caught up on advance sheets, read news magazines, or stared into the middle distance. There was no pocket book tucked into Jon's litigation bag or in the pocket of his belted raincoat that looked like a Burberry. Such had been Schmidt's personal observations during the early years of their working together, when they often sat side by side in the plane, Schmidt struggling, once his own "homework" was done, to stay awake over some contraband belles lettres. Discreet interrogation of Jon had revealed only one subsequent change in his traveling habits: as the proud owner of a laptop computer, he could also use the time to write memos to files and work on his checkbook. What was this young man if not a nerd, or in the slang of Schmidt's own generation, apparently coming back into use, a wonk, a wonk with pectorals? His Charlotte, his brave, wondrous Charlotte, intended to forsake all others and cleave to a wonk, a turkey, a Jew!

Schmidt kicked the last of the stray apples. His anger was like a bad taste in the mouth.

That final indignity was unmentionable. He could not have spoken of it to Mary: a word against the Jews, and she brought all the sins of Hitler on your head, but this marriage was not a matter of civil rights or equal opportunity or, God help him, the gas ovens. To the best of his recollection, no matter how deeply or how far back he looked, Schmidt was sure he had not once in his life stood in the way of any Jew. But now he was discovering that what didn't count at W & K (which had certainly filled up with Jews since the day he had himself gone to work there) and what could even furnish him at times some eyebrow-raising sort of amusement, as it had when Jews, beginning in the seventies, had begun to move into his Fifth Avenue apartment building, or joined one of his clubs, did count heavily when it came to his family, or what was left of it! This marriage would turn Charlotte, his one remaining link with life, into a link with a world that wasn't his--the psychiatrist parents he had so far escaped meeting, grandparents on the mother's side whom Jon occasionally mentioned, possibly uncles, aunts, and cousins he hadn't yet hear about. What might they be like? That contact with them would be unpleasant, that it would put a strain on his quiet good manners and composure, he was quite sure. Before long, they would cover Charlotte like ooze from the sea; they would absorb her and leave him out; never again would he be alone with her on his own ground; the pool-house kitchen and its hostile threshold were the microcosm of his future.

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