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The Privileged Life |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Edward Hower |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1997 |
| Size: 2,176 Words, 13,327 Characters |
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ABOUT SCHMIDT
Louis Begley
New York: Knopf, 1996
274 pp., $23.00
The theme of Louis Begley's acclaimed first novel, Wartime Lies--written when he was in his late fifties and partially based on his childhood experiences in Europe--was deception: A boy and his aunt manage to live through the Nazi invasion of Poland by pretending to be Christians. The young survivor, Maciek, becomes so involved in his life of subterfuge that when he plays with toy soldiers, he directs his German army to crush the opposition. By the end of the war, he is sadly confused about his own identity.
About Schmidt, Begley's fourth book, also deals with the idea of deception. Its main character might be Maciek grown up into a sixty-úyear-old retired New York lawyer, recovering from the trauma of his wife's recent death, except for one important fact: Schmidt is a WASP, not a Jew. His problem is self-deception: He has enjoyed a long and prosperous career, never once suspecting--though others have been sure of it--that he's an anti-Semite.
Schmidt is also a terrific snob, a timid, conservative, buttoned-údown fogy who worries about his cleaning woman finding socks on the bedroom floor and about whether his annual income of $330,000 will be enough to live on. His main problem, however, concerns love--and this is w...
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...bandoning his suffocating self-deception. Schmidt finally learns to distinguish between true honesty and the cold moral rectitude that brought him success as an attorney but failure as a family man. He may be difficult to love, but his failures, like his loneliness and confusion, are all too human. Begley's great accomplishment is making us root for Schmidt as he struggles to overcome them. vbcrlf
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
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