[In the following review, Filkins traces Schmidt's trials, epiphanies of thought, and subsequent redemption in Schmidt Delivered.]

With the publication of Wartime Lies in 1991, Louis Begley stepped to the center of international letters with the deeply compelling tale of a young Polish Jew forced to abandon his childhood while waiting out World War II with his aunt, both of them disguised as Christians. Their harrowing efforts to escape detection by the Germans made for a powerful debut by a writer who took up the pen in late middle age after spending his entire adult life working as a lawyer.

Begley's admission that Maciek's story paralleled his own experience in general terms gave additional weight to the book's central theme of deception and the terrible price paid for the loss of one's identity. The nameless middle-aged narrator who begins the novel describes himself as having been “changed inside forever, like a beaten dog,” condemned to a perpetual hell by having been forced to live a lie in order to survive. It seemed logical to apply this insight to Begley as well, for he too had spent decades living the life of a successful member of high society with little acknowledgment of his past.

The ability to shed light on such dark material through the redemptive act of fiction was to be his saving grace. Though Wartime Lies introduced readers to a serious writer able to tackle grueling themes through controlled understatement, the five novels Begley has produced since then have proved him to be a gifted observer and ironist, possessed of an impeccable sense of style. He is one of the few artists around capable of advancing a serious moral plan without collapsing into homilies or psychobabble. Though Maciek may have survived the grim childhood of Wartime Lies only to suffer the narrator's “own shame at being alive,” Begley the writer has remained at a further remove, able to shift from the insufferable reality of the Holocaust to explore the pain and pettiness of everyday life.

How he chose to conduct this exploration is in itself remarkable. Rather than a gradual transformation from Maciek's wartime suffering to a postwar normality, Begley chose to leap from one extreme to another, taking his readers from the confines of the Polish ghetto to the jet-set world of international finance in his second novel, The Man Who Was Late, which appeared in 1993. The story of Ben, a Jewish refugee who suppresses his past, it depicts a powerful, yet wretched man who doesn't even realize the self-deception involved in his endless urge to conquer the world through an accumulation of wealth and sexual conquests. Unable to face his own emotions, he takes his life, remaining an enigma to himself and his closest friend, Jack, the book's narrator, who can neither comprehend nor assuage Ben's demons.

Begley's 1995 novel, As Max Saw It, gave us another man suffering emotional lockdown in the narrator, Max, a middle-aged Harvard law professor. After many years he meets up with his college buddy Charlie Swan, a successful architect who inhabits “a magical realm of cashless bounty and comfort.” Eventually Max becomes privy to Charlie's homosexual love life. When Charlie's boyish companion dies of AIDS, Max's own tepid marriages and struggles to love contrast with his friend's raw emotions. Yet Max undergoes a cathartic transformation as he watches Charlie impale himself on his own helpless sense of loss. The result is that Max is finally able to feel, discovering that “when a powerful emotion seizes a man's faculties it displaces all others.”

THE PRICE OF DECEPTION

In these three novels Begley succeeds at something few writers have done, namely to create an interpretive bridge between the extremity of suffering caused by the Holocaust and the human failings found in the everyday world. By focusing on the central theme of deception and the price to be paid by those infected with its poison, he explores a moral colloquy as pertinent to Warsaw as it is Wall Street. At its heart rests the question of what happens to human beings who do not know themselves and, therefore, do not know others. Maciek's tragedy is that his disavowal is an enforced one. Though Ben and Max's lack of self-awareness may result from their own failings, here too Begley is careful to knit together such self-deceit out of the circumstances that surround them. Nonetheless, how are they to love? And failing that, how do they live? Sadly enough, all three novels would argue there's little hope for each. Similarly, Begley's fifth novel, Mistler's Exit, published in 1998, went on to take such bleakness to its utter limit in sketching the last days of Thomas Mistler, an advertising executive dying of liver cancer who travels to Venice for a final journey through his own dark passages of money, greed, and self-hatred.

ENTER ALBERT SCHMIDT

Begley's vision and career, however, had already taken a dramatic turn in 1996 with the publication of his fourth novel, About Schmidt. A lawyer with the New York firm of Wood & King, Albert Schmidt filled the high-society profile Begley had carved out for all his post-Maciek protagonists, but this time there were key changes. For one, Schmidt was not in the prime of his life but rather retired after the death of his wife, Mary. In addition, though at last wealthy and well off in Bridgehampton, Long Island, Schmidt is not a globe-trotter like Ben and Max, but rather a citified suburbanite mired in the flaws and failings of raising a family in contemporary America. Though his wife is dead, he is not freed from the chains of fatherhood, for from the novel's start he finds himself in a knockdown battle with his daughter Charlotte over how to properly convey her mother's inheritance to her while still sheltering enough from taxes to allow him to live on in comfort. What ratchets up the ante in this bickering is Charlotte's impending wedding with Jon Riker, an attorney in Schmidt's old firm who has just been named partner despite Schmidt's own reservations about his being “a wonk, a turkey, a Jew!”

For despite all similarity of class and occupation to Begley's earlier protagonists, the key difference about Schmidt is that he is and remains a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite. If it's not enough that Schmidt slept with his daughter's nanny, or that he can't keep from mentally undressing a 25-year-old Puerto Rican waitress named Carrie whom he eventually beds, or that he despises a homeless man he eventually runs over by accident, or that he can only concern himself with tax breaks in passing on his daughter's inheritance, Schmidt's perverse queasiness at the prospect of his daughter marrying a Jew is enough to qualify him as a thoroughly despicable character.

Begley, however, is a writer who avoids stereotypes. Our response to “Schmidtie” is complicated by the fact that despite his lechery, greed, and deep-seated prejudice, he is also endlessly fascinating, if not immensely entertaining as a character. Schmidt's appetites may know no bounds, but Begley refuses to provide us with the opportunity for an armchair condemnation. Instead, we are implicated in each of his flaws by a thorough understanding of the consciousness that gives rise to them. Though the reader may not approve of Schmidt's coarseness, Begley's clear-eyed prose draws us into his character's nimble mind as it mixes perversion and polemics with a flair that marks it as distinctly human.

Such holds true as well for Schmidt's reappearance in Begley's new novel, Schmidt Delivered. Having survived several calamities afoot in the first novel, Schmidt manages to win the girl, keep the daughter's love, and retain his tax shelter. Hence, at the start of the new novel, we find him still ensconced in his Bridgehampton home, Carrie beside him in bed. Trouble, however, is not far off as Schmidt is awakened by a phone call from Mike Mansour, a billionaire investor who backs the films of Schmidt's longtime friend Gil Blackman. The call brings only an invitation to lunch, but this leads to a complicated friendship with Mansour, “some sort of Egyptian Jew,” who later tries to steal Carrie, advises her to break free, and eventually provides the means for her to do so, thus leaving Schmidtie to face old age alone.

Schmidt looks on as all this happens, unable to do anything until it is much too late, despite his own wariness of the world and “what desolation awaited him down the road.” For things happen “about” Schmidt, and only invisibly inside him, and in this he shares the icy passivity of Begley's other characters. The key difference, though, is his ability to observe and reflect with acute insight about people and events, just as it is Begley's ability to plug the reader into the unfolding consciousness that redeems him as a character. Here, for instance, is a moment of Schmidt in thought as he swims laps while mulling over his social life:

Were there former colleagues, active and retired partners of Wood & King, who liked him, with whom he could reestablish some sort of ties? He thought that, on the whole, their feelings toward him were pleasantly benevolent. The exception, of course, would be Charlotte's husband, Jon Riker. If by some miracle that fellow could push a button and electrocute his father-in-law in his own swimming pool, there wasn't a force great enough, Schmidt thought, not even Wood & King's presiding partner, that could keep his big fat finger off the button. As a practical matter, none of this mattered. His old legal pals didn't happen to pass their summers or weekends anywhere nearby, and, to Schmidt's surprise, until he divined that she didn't especially care to live nearer to Brooklyn and her parents, Carrie showed no interest in the suggestion he had floated that they get an apartment in New York. And suppose they did, how would he go about launching them as a couple? Would he arrange a round of cocktails, little dinners, and theater outings? He had been used to seeing his partners mostly over lunch. The wives he saw twice a year, at firm dinners for partners and their spouses—since they had begun to take women into the partnership, spouses were no longer necessarily wives—and the firm outings for all lawyers and concubines of any sexual orientation designed to promote good fellowship through a day of tennis, golf, and drinking. It had suited Mary to keep her distance from his firm, and Schmidt wasn't sure that left to himself he would have preferred to be more clearly in the thick of it. Even if Carrie were not in the picture, it would have been awkward, and perhaps not possible, to live down his past aloofness, to become one of the boys. But imagine Jack and Dorothy DeForrestor even the W & K man-of-the-world Lew Brenner and his wife, Tina—invited to a small dinner at Schmidtie's brand-new penthouse to meet Miss Carrie Gorchuck. They would get through the meal and the coffee and brandy all right, though the men might be too unsettled to cluster as usual in the corner of the living room to talk about the firm's finances, but afterward, what a fuss! Schmidt with a girl younger than his own daughter, yes, younger than Jon Riker's wife! No, she's not a lawyer. I asked what she did and she came right out with it; she was a waitress until the old goat came along and made it worth her while to give up working. Beautiful as the day is long, absolutely—and then, depending on the speaker, a further graphic detail might follow—but, you know, with just a touch of the tarbrush. Some sort of Hispanic. Yes, Puerto Rican. It was just as well that the issue didn't need to be faced. The very young partners—and certainly the associates—would think the new Mrs. Schmidt was a ten. But what was Schmidt to them or they to him?

What such a passage grants us is the shape and feel of conscious thought itself, as well as how that thought traces an entire social stratum and its central failings. Troubled and troubling though it may be, it nonetheless remains as fascinating as it is supple in its rendering. To deny, suppress, or censor it through easy condemnation not only misses the point but fails the moral test that Begley's fiction proffers us. Ironically, to write off Schmidtie the lech and passive racist is to employ a scaled-down version of the denial of identity that forced Maciek into hiding. In addition, to condemn him outright is also to refuse the fact that we recognize and understand him, and thus to succumb to self-deception ourselves. Instead, his last question—“what was Schmidt to them or they to him?”—should also be the one we ask seriously of him as a character, and no less of ourselves.

THE ANTI HERO REDEEMED

What saves Schmidt in the end is his ability to analyze his relationship to the people around him. When his daughter's marriage breaks up, he is eager to support her emotionally, though at first reluctant to loan her money to start a new business. He recognizes, however, that she needs his help, no matter how grudging it may be. Eventually her plans fall through and she returns to Jon, who has been kicked out of the firm after causing a scandal. Schmidt is again unsupportive, though troubled by how upset Charlotte is at him. Reflecting on his own failings in life, he discovers that “once he understood the mess he had made and its likely consequences, the more powerful sensation that made him go on took over, one of fatality, of being carried he didn't know where by a force he couldn't and didn't want to control.”

This is a first for Schmidt, for he has always lived a life of supreme control. Part of the reason he is able to arrive at such an insight lies in his acceptance of his own aging and death. Another part, however, lies in his friendship with Mike Mansour, for it is he who tells Schmidt to “make a life for yourself.” In fact, Mansour seems determined to do this for him. Attempting at one time to seduce Carrie, at another offering Schmidt the directorship of his massive foundation, Mansour strikes Schmidt as “the only man he had ever met who wanted everyone around him to feel manipulated.” Eventually, Schmidt gives in to Mansour's “eerily brutal and bright” sense of power simply because he is “forced to accept the peculiar fact that he had become attached to him and that, within limits that were as yet ill defined, had come to trust him.” Just why escapes Schmidt at first, but most likely it is because Mansour's central question is his own, namely “how I should use my power and wealth.”

On behalf of others and not simply to control them is the answer that Schmidt eventually arrives at, but it takes a while to come to a man who believes that “generosity begins and ends with gratifying the giver.” In freeing Carrie to her own life and love, in accepting his daughter's need to return to her husband and his failure of her, Schmidt suddenly finds himself entering “an expanded state of personal freedom.” The result is that he and Carrie achieve a denouement in which he is able to make her his “contented beneficiary” without violating the love they still share. Schmidt recognizes in the process that “he too had been delivered,” for what he finds is that, indeed, love does conquer all, if only momentarily, for this time he loses the girl and finds himself alone and hoofing it around Europe as director of Mansour's foundation.

That Schmidt is delivered, for the moment, is a matter of both luck through redemption and redemption through luck. Striking a truce with his daughter in the final pages, he can at best say that he has come to terms with his life and those most dear to him. However, time still chases Schmidt in a race he knows he will lose. He also knows that he is “set in his mold,” though he has at least won the knowledge that “he could not break it alone.” In more ways than one, Schmidt remains an unfinished man, and that in the end is his greatest charm. And for our benefit as readers, let's hope that Louis Begley is not yet finished with this anti-hero who miraculously does some good in a world so full of harm.