Dan Cryer
. . . This is an art that calls to mind Louis Auchincloss' upper-crust characters, Paul Auster's defiantly unsentimental voice and Alice Munro's vivid, nonsense storytelling. Begley marshals all these elements. . . and forges a fiction altogether his own. -- Newsday
Gabriel Brownstein
Begley probes with intelligence and skill. -- Boston Sunday Globe
Jack Miles
Whether the subject is art, religion, literature, fatherhood or friendship, Begley has mined his novel with depth charges that he seems to invite the reader to detonate beneath his own protagonist. The result is a novel that is brillantly, brutally countercathartic. -- The New York Times
Thomas Hines
A stunning achievement. . . Begley has created a terribly funny, touching, infuriating, and complex character in Schmidt, whose self-deceptions and imprisonment by his own worldview stand not only as a devastating portrait of a disappearing world but also sound a strangely evocative cautionary tale. . . We are chagrined that the telling detail, the crystalline prose, has to end. -- Los Angeles Times
Vanessa V. Friedman
There is a compellingly austere, cut-glass clarity to the book. -- Entertainment Weekly
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
There is perhaps no more worldly novelist writing today than Begley: worldly in his attention to class, wealth and sex, but most of all in his attention to pleasure in the face of death. So when his latest protagonist, Thomas Mistler, ruthless captain of a huge advertising firm, learns that he has cancer of the liver, he decides not to fight it and not to tell his wife or son about it immediately but, instead, to go to Venice, "the one place on earth where nothing irritated him," on a clandestine solo vacation. There he has--as Begley heroes do--a series of disquieting sexual adventures (in this case parodies of the erotic epiphany of Thomas Mann's Aschenbach), which bring home to us, if not to Mistler, his essential loneliness. In certain ways, this slim novel seems a pendant sketch to Begley's recent masterpiece, About Schmidt, another study of an aging, philandering gentleman's failures to connect. But this sketch presents enigmas of its own. Begley's dialogue, always highly starched, now sounds epistolary, as if carried on at a distance of miles and days. His hero's luxurious solipsism calls to mind not just Begley's constant great familiars (among them Mann, Jouve, Proust, James, Ford Madox Ford and Nabokov) but the random glamour of an Antonioni film, in which characters appear like emanations, free of the normal exigencies of plot. Even amid the palazzos and great churches of his vividly conjured Venice, Begley displays the bitter moral intelligence, the fear of emptiness, that has distinguished his late, extraordinary career from the start. Once again he has created a sinister, highly ambiguous protagonist in a haunting, ambivalent work of art.
Library Journal
Mistler is dying, but he doesn't invite the reader's sympathy. During a week in Venice he attracts and has an affair with a predatory young photographer, meets an old flame, and buys a boat he will never use. Mistler is a wealthy and powerful owner of a successful advertising agency. He knows he is "an indifferent husband, cold, lacking in tenderness." He loves only his father's dead mistress and his grown son, whose youth he tormented with demands for competitive excellence. He lies and cheats, in big matters and small (evading the fare on a vaporetto). He purports to be a lover of Titian, but this is stated, not felt. -- Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence College Library, Bronxville, NY
Library Journal
A Madison Avenue executive wraps up his life with a visit to Venice. From the author of About Schmidt (LJ 6/15/96).
Jack Miles
. . .[H]as the structure of a first-person narrative, but it is told in the third person. . ..[the] voice knows only Mistler, but it doesn't much like him, and as a result neither do we. -- The New York Times Book Review
Kirkus Reviews
Begley's fifth (About Schmidt, 1996; As Max Saw It, 1994) is the tale of a master of finance, advertising, actually, who faces terminal cancer with the same stiff upper lip and commanding refinement that led him through his not- always-appealing life. Diagnosed with cancer that leaves him about half a year to go, Thomas Mistler heads into the final few months of his life in panic? despair? fear? None of the above, thank you. This man who has gotten, taken, one might say, all he's wanted from life isn't going to stop living the same way now. He'll tell all to his dutiful but unloved wife Clara, but not just yet, and the same for his much-loved but distant son and only child, Sam, 36. There'll be time later for final moments, but it's essential first that the sale of Mistler's firm, already underway, not be jeopardized by news of his illness. Still, on the other hand, maybe Mistler does need to be alone and think a little: so, with a few practical lies to Clara and Sam, business abroad, delays, he's off to his favorite city of Venice, 'the one place on earth where nothing irritated him.' Not quite true, though, since unexpected sex with a girl he'd met only once, at a New York dinner party, ends up turning him cruelly pompous and giving her the push, so he's alone to appreciate the great art, food, and wines ('There were so many reds he had never drunk') of the ancient city. But even then, he'll bump into an old Harvard classmate, through him into another one, who this time, we're led to believe, is the one great (uncaptured) passion of his life, for whom he buys an exquisite antique glass candelabra, impressing even the glass-dealer with his knowledge, taste,refinement, and discretion. The chronicling of a patrician life from the inside: sometimes gripping, often familiar, much of the time with airs.
