The recent appearance of two generically related novels by Louis Begley justifies a look back at the career of this extraordinary writer. Or rather, his second career since his first was as partner in the New York corporate law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton.
His childhood was rather different, that of a young Jewish boy growing up in Poland during the Nazi occupation who managed to survive, emigrating to America with his parents after the war. Begley came to literary attention with his first novel, Wartime Lies (1991), to which some of his own early experience contributed. The book won a couple of literary prizes and launched Begley into a productive quarter-century of 12 novels, plus a history of the Dreyfus affair and a short biography of Franz Kafka.
In the dedication to the first of his two recent Jack Dana novels, Killer, Come Hither (2015), Begley refers to the book (and the subsequent Jack Dana published this past spring) as a “departure,” so the obvious question is: departure from what? A back-cover synopsis of the sequel, Kill and Be Killed (2016), introduces its hero, “Jack Dana, the former Marine Corps officer turned novelist whose quest to avenge his murdered uncle takes a new, more dangerous turn.” This is enough to suggest that the atmosphere of Kill and Be Killed is not reminiscent of Henry James or Virginia Woolf: We are in Thriller territory and are promised a novel full of action, violence, and a lively plot.
As for its protagonist, Jack Dana is certainly a candidate for superhero: a graduate of Yale with a fellowship to Balliol College, Oxford, and an invitation from the Society of Fellows at Harvard. But when 9/11 intervenes, he decides to join the Marine Corps, serving as an officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though he is critical of both wars. Wounded in Afghanistan, he recuperates at Walter Reed and begins there what will be his first novel. The major action of Killer, Come Hither is Jack’s attempt to exact vengeance on the man who killed his beloved Uncle Harry.
In tone, style, and plot, we couldn’t be further away from the book that began Begley’s novel-writing life, Wartime Lies, a first-person narrative by a Polish boy named Maciek. The narrative is prefaced by an odd and fascinating three pages in italics as spoken by the writer who invented Maciek: He is a “bookish fellow,” with “fifty or more winters on his back,” and who now, having lived through the horror of his childhood, “avoids Holocaust books and dinner conversation about Poland in the Second World War.” Instead, he focuses on the child who became the man he now is.
Wartime Lies is an unsparing novel that doesn’t quite feel like a novel; there are few changes of tone in the narrative, as events grim and not so grim are relayed in a steady voice. For that reason, the book is hard to quote from, and testifies to the calmly severe manner in which Begley decided to treat his subject. There followed a pair of more conventional, though well-observed and entertaining, novels. Then, five years after Wartime Lies, Begley hit upon a character and milieu wholly American that would provide him with two further novels with the same protagonist: About Schmidt (1996), followed by Schmidt Delivered (2000) and Schmidt Steps Back (2012). This bracing triad of vividly humorous books is told throughout in a tone both sardonic and sensitive.
Albert Schmidt is a retired corporate lawyer in New York who negotiates early retirement and moves to Long Island with his wife, who then dies after a painful illness. Schmidt has plenty of money and a single child, a daughter, who plans to marry a man Schmidt helped promote in his law firm. Schmidt dislikes the young man, Jon Riker, who is unpleasant enough in conversation (he keeps referring to Schmidt as “Al”) but is also Jewish, thereby opening Schmidt to the charge of antisemitism.
This is the interesting “given” of the novel, a man many of whose likes and dislikes we sympathize with but can’t exonerate from antisemitism: His best friend, Gil Blackman, a Jew, also sees this trait in Schmidt. In a brief interview when the first Schmidt novel was published, Begley was asked whether he found it difficult to write about antisemitism, to which he replied that, no, he found it amusing. The interviewer didn’t follow up on this, but it suggests that Begley, like his protagonist, doesn’t mind being a bit perverse, at least ironic, in his response to take-it-or-leave-it questions. (Who knows, maybe Shakespeare found it amusing to write the scene in King Lear where Gloucester’s eyes are extruded.)
About Schmidt was made into a highly successful and agreeable movie starring Jack Nicholson, but its success was achieved at the cost of making a travesty of the novel. (In the film, Schmidt, a Nebraska insurance actuary, heads west in his own bus, eventually ending up in a hot tub with a dominating female.) By contrast, in the novel Begley wrote, there is very little “action” since we are steadily confined within the hero’s stream of thought, a confinement effected partly through the absence of quotation marks around speeches. Begley has compared such marks to little bugs. When his daughter accuses him of antisemitism in relation to her husband-to-be, Schmidt considers the matter fully:
This was amusing to write, I would guess, and amusing to read for its aperçus. To speak (as one reviewer did) of Albert Schmidt as a “flawed hero” or, in more homely terms, a “curmudgeon” ruins the pleasure. It’s all a matter of tonal subtlety, as when Schmidt returns from a holiday, lights up a “moist, dark and rather sweet-tasting cigar,” and reflects:
Every so often, in the Schmidt novels, something terrible happens, such as his daughter’s confinement in a mental clinic. Then, after her recovery and imminent marriage to a new man whom Schmidt likes, a dreadful car accident on the Long Island Expressway kills the couple. And there are the ups and down of Schmidt’s erotic adventures with a young Puerto Rican waitress, then with a cultivated older woman, not without painful setbacks. Overall, however, there is a “positive,” even sprightly, atmosphere to these books: The acerbic humor keeps coming, putting us in the presence of someone like us—except that he has behind him the stylistic energy of Louis Begley’s sentences.
The aforementioned “departure” in Begley’s two thrillers is partly a departure from social realism in favor of a more extreme and simplified presentation of character. The women Captain Dana engages with—the death of one of them spurs the action in Kill and Be Killed—are beautiful, intelligent, and sexy; the thugs, invariably from Bosnia and Serbia with names like Slobo and Jovan, are too bad to be true, as is the fountain of evil, a business tycoon named Abner Brown. Jack himself, along with his literary intelligence, has now produced three novels and is physically equipped in an altogether admirable way, with a command of knives, guns, and other suitably aggressive instruments.
In a Jack Dana novel, people don’t just sit down and eat a hearty lunch or dinner: They have black-bean soup and cold poached salmon, with a glass of Riesling. Or a white gazpacho followed by shrimp quiche, cheese, and grapes for dessert and a bottle of Sancerre. Or Hunan tripe and sliced lamb in a hot scallion sauce. When Dana makes a drink, which is often, it’s almost always a martini, “five-sixths gin straight out of the freezer, one-sixth vermouth freshly extracted from the fridge, and an almost transparent lemon peel.” In this atmos-phere, it is unlikely that the reader will be invited into what T. S. Eliot called “the third dimension”—the inside of characters’ heads to be pondered and explored. Eliot used the term to describe what Shakespeare gives us that his contemporary Ben Jonson does not. But Jonson, like Begley, was not trying to get the third dimension. Instead, he presents us with (in Eliot’s words) “a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colors.”
This is not to say that we’re denied access to Jack Dana’s feelings, but there’s relatively little attempt at subtle exploration of grief or complicated outrage at the bad guys. Ben Jonson’s scabrous comedy eschewed the delicate; Louis Begley’s thrillers, for all their violence, have the overall feel of comedy, if comedy on the dark side. You feel that the author of the Schmidt novels is still there, concocting a world in which the retired lawyer got transformed into a young superhero. At one moment, Jack Dana even demonstrates a response to great music, to Dido’s “Lament” in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (“When I am laid, am laid in earth”). Unlikely as it may seem, he finds himself in tears “for her and for the self-absorbed and heartless Aeneas and for every stupid slob who breaks the heart of someone he loves.”
We may detect here the heart of Louis Begley informing the response of his protagonist, and there’s something satisfying in this glimpse of the man behind the mask.
William H. Pritchard is the author, most recently, of Writing to Live: Commentaries on Literature and Music.
