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BOOK REVIEW* |
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By
PHYLLIS ROSE, BOOK CRITIC September 22, 1996 |
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Some
of Western literature's most resonant works, including ''King Lear'' and
Henry James's novel ''The Spoils of Poynton,'' concern the transfer of
property from one generation to the next. The issues raised by inheritance
-- the limits to love between parents and children, the fading but still
formidable power of the parents, the almost inevitable ingratitude of the
children as they pursue their own goals, the new alliances and potential
betrayals involved in any marriage -- touch all of us, whether we have a
kingdom or splendid British country house to pass on or only some
precious, albeit worthless, family tchotchkes. In Louis Begley's fine new
novel, ''About Schmidt,'' the property at issue is a house in the Hamptons,
and although most readers might salivate at the prospect of owning such a
house, inherited by Albert Schmidt from his wife's maiden aunt, his
daughter -- wouldn't you know? -- would rather spend her weekends upstate,
and her fiancé worries about the upkeep. Schmidt is a buttoned-up,
emotionally deprived man who has recently lost his wife, Mary, on whom he
depended for his social life. A meticulous corporate lawyer, known for
drafting elegant contracts, he retired early in order to care for her in
her final illness. Now he is lonely, adrift and at odds with his only
child, Charlotte, who, in addition to having bewilderingly turned into a
yuppie he can't completely like (she does public relations on behalf of
tobacco companies), has announced that she will marry a man he completely
dislikes, a partner in Schmidt's firm -- a nerd, a bankruptcy maven, a
Jew. For yes, even though his best friend is Jewish and considers his
anti-Semitism ''innocuous, one might almost say irrelevant,'' ''Schmidtie''
is an anti-Semite. Mr.
Begley is too fastidious to make Schmidt likable, as though to elicit
sympathy for him would then be too easy. How much greater the literary
accomplishment to make us pity, understand, even identify with someone we
have permission to write off. Mr.
Begley, who is a lawyer as well as a novelist, made his stunning literary
debut with ''Wartime Lies,'' a novel about a Jewish boy hiding from the
Nazis, passing for Christian. This new novel could be called ''Peacetime
Truths,'' not only for the way it touches on ''innocuous'' anti-Semitism
but because its protagonist is ''an odd stickler for the truth,'' who, for
example, feeling no affection for his prospective son-in-law, makes no
pretense of affection in the slightest degree, even to the young man's
mother. Whereas ''Wartime Lies'' explored duplicity and imposture, ''About
Schmidt'' presents a determined search for accuracy in emotion, as the
widower and retiree moves into a new phase of life, the last. Much
as he wants to think that he is acting out of generosity in transferring
his life interest in the Bridgehampton house to his daughter as a wedding
present, Schmidt has to admit to himself that it is done partly ''to avoid
the duty I would feel to treat my married daughter and her husband as
co-owners.'' So: the selfishness within generosity, the distaste mingled
with parental love, the promiscuity that coexists with the deepest marital
devotion. ''About Schmidt'' gets at them all. Sometimes
the truth-telling can be hard to take, like this, on women's aging: ''It
seemed to Schmidt that loss of the ability to attract was an affliction as
generalized among his female coevals as thinness of hair, the sclera and
teeth turned yellow, sour breath, flaccidity or gigantism of breasts,
midriffs gone soft and distended by wind, brown blotches and deltas of
minute angry veins around the knee and on the calf, disastrous, swollen
toes verging on deformity displayed in sandals or throbbing in the prison
of black pumps. To tease Mary, he used to tell her what, in fact, he
thought was the truth: that his own loss of libido, from the effects of
which she was exempt . . . had less to do with his own aging than with the
aging of the women around him.'' (It's
a minor flaw in the novel that Schmidt, at 60, seems too young to be
carrying on so about age, and too old -- the same goes for his Jewish
film-maker pal and quondam college roommate -- to be so attractive to
women in their 20's. If their young girlfriends exist to prove these men
aren't as old as they think, it doesn't work. One geriophilic young woman
per novel might be credible. Not two.) Whatever
you think of him, Schmidt is remarkable for his clarity of mind. Why, he
asks himself, should he give up alcohol, tobacco, cheese, red meat and
eggs, for the sake of a longevity whose pleasures were unknown? As it was,
''it seemed reasonable to stick to his agreeable, life-shortening habits,
perhaps even to acquire new ones.'' In a crucial scene, Charlotte, on the
telephone, distressed at feeling she has to reject both the wedding party
and the house her father has been offering, attacks him, saying that
according to her fiance, Schmidt's whole firm had considered him an
anti-Semite. In a peacemaking effort, her mother-in-law-to-be, a
psychiatrist, calls Schmidt to explain that Charlotte's inappropriate
aggressive behavior had been caused by her guilt. But Schmidt only wants
to know: did her aggressiveness consist of telling the truth or telling a
lie? Did his partners really consider him anti-Semitic? This
book exists at a point where the dry probity of a certain high-WASP
temperament and the dry secular spirit in Judaism meet. It resolutely
refuses transcendence. The temperature never goes up. The pitch never
varies. You never feel you are being manipulated into a falsely emotional
response. You can trust it as you trust a well-wrought contract: it keeps
its affect entirely under control. It never tries to mean more than it
says -- in fact, tries strenuously not to. This, to me, is the great
pleasure of reading Louis Begley. His exceptional literary intelligence is
always in control, making me wonder if more novelists shouldn't develop
the virtues of lawyers as writers: accuracy, economy, abjuring the
language of emotion. Quietly,
the novel gains power as it continues. A deep underlying pessimism comes
more often to the surface. ''All lives end badly,'' Schmidt believes, and
if a certain couple seems happy, it's because their lives ''had not yet
been broken. Their time would come.'' Ultimately, all books about
inheritance are about Heraclitean flow. The river of life moves on. Things
change. Poynton burns. The Hamptons aren't what they used to be. People we
expect to die don't, and those we don't expect to die do. Wills reveal
intentions we never suspected. Schmidt's new woman is a Puerto Rican
waitress younger than his daughter. And so unpredictable is the current
that things end well for him. The final events of the novel remind us,
cleverly and wisely, that every older generation was once a younger
generation, that every generation, no matter how loving or beloved, by its
very existence poses problems for the generation, parental or filial, with
which it is inextricably linked. 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 -- someone, on the other
hand, you might just know or be, an ordinary person with ordinary
problems, even if he does have a retirement income of some $330,000 a
year. Phyllis
Rose has completed a memoir, ''The Year of Reading Proust.'' Published:
09 - 22 - 1996 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 13 |
Copyright
1996, New York Times
*Reprinted by permission of the New York Times