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BOOK REVIEW* |
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By
DAPHNE MERKIN, BOOK CRITIC December 17, 2000 |
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The novel of manners --
in which a recognizably bourgeois world is held up to the light and
examined for flaws that might escape notice under less intense scrutiny --
is a specialized taste, requiring a certain level of equanimity in its
readers. Its gently skewering style is best enjoyed in a state of
emotional and physical repose; too much ontological angst in the reader,
in other words, and the fun will seem not only frivolous but beside the
point. Because such novels presuppose an intentionality, an inherent
purpose, at work in the universe, their ideal audience is made up of
contented members of the status quo, connoisseurs of life's small comforts
and subtler pleasures. Although an implicit awareness of society's more
grievous failings hovers around the edges of these narratives, they fit
into the tradition of urbane satire -- founded, one might say, on the
precept that observing well is the best revenge -- rather than that of a
tough-minded realism or angry sendup. Readers are free to immerse
themselves in whatever havoc is let loose, secure in the knowledge that a
classical sense of order will reassert itself by the last page. The practitioners of
this form of fiction have often been women. There is the peerless Jane
Austen, of course, with her magician-like talent for pulling harmonious
resolutions out of a hat. In the modern era, Elizabeth Bowen was
particularly skilled at evoking the tempest-in-a-teacup tizzy that marks
the genre, although her vision was darker than many. Contemporary writers
include Muriel Spark and Alison Lurie, who, in their different ways, poke
at the risible assumptions that characterize all self-contained,
privileged worlds. But there has always existed a small coterie of male
writers who share the preoccupations of the novel of manners: the
gimlet-eyed Evelyn Waugh, the underappreciated British writer Henry Green
and, in our own time, Louis Auchincloss, who carries aloft the banner of
the old guard. In recent years, there
has been another voice on the scene -- one that has infused this
hidebound, somewhat predictable genre with an unsettling energy. The
belief that the younger the novelist the more subversive the literary
impulse is an almost axiomatic one, but sometimes it takes a late starter
to shed the anxiety of influence and ruffle some feathers. Louis Begley, a
senior partner at a venerable New York City law firm, published his
acclaimed first novel, ''Wartime Lies,'' in 1991 at the age of 57. The
book centers on the fate of Maciek, a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jewish boy
living in Warsaw in 1939; together with his Aunt Tania, Maciek succeeds in
dodging the long shadow of the Holocaust by passing himself off as an
Aryan and staying on the run. Despite its title, which suggests a work of
the imagination rather than literal documentation, ''Wartime Lies''
clearly drew on autobiographical details and was often referred to as a
memoir-in-disguise rather than a novel. Already with this first effort,
then, Begley upended the simple literary conventions by which we presume
to pin labels on elusive and shifting material. Although his subsequent
books departed radically from the subject matter of this first one, its
underlying theme -- which is the contingent and fungible nature of
identity, including the identity of the writer -- continued to appear in
other guises. In Begley's new novel,
''Schmidt Delivered,'' we meet up again with Alfred Schmidt, Esq. --
better known as Schmidtie -- the aging, defiantly bigoted antihero of his
previous novel, ''About Schmidt.'' Schmidt, a recently retired widower who
has sold his Fifth Avenue apartment and taken up permanent residence in
his summer house in Bridgehampton, disapproves of affirmative action,
pushy Jews, blue-collar locals who aspire beyond their station and the
general egalitarian drift of contemporary life. In the earlier book, he
has to adapt himself to the impingements of an alien reality: his
daughter, Charlotte, the beneficiary of French and riding lessons, a
graduate of Brearley and Harvard, has mutated into an increasingly hostile
''iron-pumping yuppie'' who does public relations for a tobacco company.
Even more disturbingly, she has become engaged to Jon Riker, ''the vulgar
boy'' Schmidt recommended for partnership at his white-shoe law firm,
despite Riker's being of the Jewish persuasion. But much to his own and
our surprise, Schmidt proves that he is not just another of ''the sunset
people,'' doomed to live out his life nursing his bourbon, staring into
his memories. By the end of ''About Schmidt,'' he has become involved with
Carrie, a sexy Puerto Rican waitress who is younger than his daughter, and
he appears to be on the verge of entering his twilight years as an almost
tolerant man. Begley is nothing if
not cleareyed, however, and character will out. In ''Schmidt Delivered''
he serves up a largely unreconstructed Schmidtie, his newfound ardor for
Carrie, his dusky-skinned, live-in ''child mistress'' notwithstanding.
(Indeed, this dried-up husk of a ''fuddy-duddy retired gent'' with his
''geriatric caresses'' has the sexual interest, if not the stamina, of a
20-year-old stud -- his ''little guy,'' as Carrie facetiously calls it,
almost always at the ready.) Schmidt is still resolutely committed to a
disdainful, taxonomic view of humanity, whether it be ''half-breeds'' like
his own lover, waiters with ''overly familiar manners,'' ''queers putting
on Off Broadway plays for queers,'' psychiatrists who babble about
''empowering,'' ''black teenage girls'' who ''screw up on the cash
register'' and Arabs and Jews with their ''odious rhetoric.'' (Schmidt
prefers, understandably, to think of it in more fastidious terms: ''Even
when it came to Arabs, his dislikes were individualized; they weren't
racial prejudice. He had absolutely nothing against King Hussein.'')
Although he is as isolated and lonely as ever, repairing to a nightly
intake of alcohol in order to ''deaden the sense of desolation,''
Schmidt's companionship is sought after by his high-flying neighbor in
East Hampton, the ''colossally rich'' Michael Mansour. Mansour, an
''eerily brutal and bright'' Jewish financier with dubious connections,
invites him to frequent lunches and dinners, where finger bowls are de
rigueur and a bodyguard named Jason provides on-the-spot shoulder
massages. The oafish Mansour speaks bluntly to this reserved,
quintessential Wasp, emphasizing the folly of Schmidt's besotted
arrangement: ''The question is, Are you kidding yourself or her? Maybe you
think you're some sort of Michael Jordan in the sack?'' Turning a deaf ear,
Schmidt continues to inhabit his delusions, insisting on viewing Carrie as
a ''fine, loyal girl'' (although she seems to have slept with every man in
sight) and dreaming of making an honest woman out of her (although she has
coyly sidestepped his proposals of marriage). In the effort to keep Carrie
happy, he heats his pool, which he prefers to keep on the cold side, and
plies his ''savage virgin goddess'' with a sultan's gifts, ranging from
his wife's gold scarab brooch to a ''gorgeous ruby-red silk man's bathrobe
made up for her by a shirtmaker in the place Vendme'' to a ''little'' BMW
for her to tootle around in. But it is to no avail. Carrie is busy
pursuing more tempting offers under Schmidt's nose: she has a brief
flirtation with Mansour in New York, and eventually takes up with the
cleft-chinned Jason, who has the ''pectorals of a discobolus.'' Schmidt is so smitten
-- and his wish to ignore the mounting troubles involving his daughter,
Charlotte, who, as ''the Jew's wife,'' has to face up to the fact of her
husband's extramarital dalliance as well as the extralegal exploits that
have cost him his partnership at Schmidt's old firm, is so strong -- that
he agrees to play the willing cuckold. The exploitative Carrie, now
pregnant, moves both Jason and her previous boyfriend, a druggy drifter,
into the premises, and even convinces the ordinarily pragmatic Schmidt to
underwrite an unlikely-sounding business venture. But for the time being,
at least, things are looking up: Charlotte and Jon eventually work their
problems out, the money issues between Schmidt and his daughter are
smoothed over and Schmidt travels the world in style, having decided to
accept Mansour's offer of a cushy position as the head of a philanthropic
foundation. True to form, ''Schmidt
Delivered'' concludes with more than a bit of authorial sleight of hand.
The mess of human entanglement is cleaned up, the cobwebs of deceit and
deception are swept back under the bed, and the place is set to rights
once again. And yet, when we close the book, we are left with a subliminal
sense of unease of the sort such novels don't usually produce -- as though
we weren't sure where the author stood, or where we were meant to put
ourselves. In Begley's adroitly conceived variation on the novel of
manners, it's left purposely ambiguous whether all's well that doesn't end
quite well -- or whether, in fact, the thinness of the ice Schmidt walks
on will crack under future pressures. Meanwhile, Begley has
written a richly nuanced concoction, cut by a lethally dry wit, about the
way we live now as reflected in the distorting fun-house mirror of the way
we lived then, in that Eloise-at-the-Plaza moment when everyone stayed on
his side of the class divide. He gives us an unblinking bird's-eye view of
a tiny world plagued by excess leisure and the demanding upkeep of luxury
-- a world that has more typically been drawn in the broad, breathless
strokes of prime-time, ''Dynasty''-derived television, the better to
gratify the fantasies of those mired in the daily grind: See the rich! See
how they play! See how the butler pours the breakfast juice into crystal
goblets! Armed with insider information about the controlling familial
maneuvers and byzantine financial strategems of the wealthy, Begley
imparts a bracingly sour wisdom to his descriptions of the conclaves where
the moneyed and powerful meet and share their avarice, need and obsessive
anxiety about gift versus estate taxes. ''Schmidt Delivered''
is marred by occasional false notes and whole patches of unconvincing
dialogue. There are some unsatisfyingly monochromatic characters as well
-- the most egregious example being the awful Charlotte, who one would
have thought had fulfilled her awfulness quotient in the first installment
of the Schmidt saga. In the ungrateful daughter sweepstakes, she could
easily give Lear's rapacious twosome, Goneril and Regan, a run for their
money, and one wonders why her father doesn't simply write her off -- or,
more effectively, out of his will. But none of these flaws detract from
the book's singular achievement, which is to quietly nudge the novel of
manners in a more provocative direction. Begley does this in part by
filtering his perceptions through the sensibility of an invented
counterself -- the person he might have been but for the grace of -- and
in part by rendering a superficially unlikable protagonist with the same
humanizing fullness other authors save for likable ones. In doing so, he
is staking out risky literary territory -- albeit in his own casually
elegant fashion. Resisting the temptation to create an appealing character
we may all secretly long to be, Begley has set himself the much more
difficult hurdle of describing the cramped inner life of a person we may
all secretly fear we are -- or given the right circumstances, might turn
into. The interesting thing about Schmidtie is that he doesn't want to be
Schmidtie either; he is his own worst self, but it is the self he is
doomed to inhabit. In giving us a penetrating -- but not entirely
merciless -- picture of this complex man, Begley succeeds in unsettling
some of our complacencies, and illuminating the straitened and ungenerous
perspective with which we frequently approach the world around us. I'm
still not sure I'd want Schmidtie as a dinner companion -- he reminds me
too much of one of those men you might expect to find sitting on the co-op
board of some prissy Park Avenue building that prides itself on turning
down single women, Jews, gays and other suspicious characters -- but
Begley has made me curious enough about him to want to read more about the
renegade opinions and touching glimpses of vulnerability that lurk behind
his inhospitable facade. Daphne Merkin, a staff
writer at The New Yorker, is the author of ''Dreaming of Hitler,'' an
essay collection. Published: 12 - 17 -
2000 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 14 |
Copyright
2000, New York Times
*Reprinted by permission of The New York Times