Schmidt Delivered by Louis Begley

“Her face, when she returned, was a beautiful blank.”

Schmidt Delivered picks up the story two years after the conclusion of About Schmidt. The protagonist, Albert Schmidt, a retired lawyer, is still living in the Hamptons with a young, Puerto Rican waitress, Carrie. Carrie’s annoying and clingy ex-boyfriend is conveniently packed off to Florida. Schmidt’s sour daughter, Charlotte, the source of a great deal of grief in About Schmidt has more or less dropped her relationship with her father. It would seem that Schmidt’s life has settled into a fairly regular domestic routine–Carrie goes off to college every day, and Schmidt waits for her to come home. He fills his spare time by dithering with the post and deciding which Trollope novel to read. Schmidt realizes that he has isolated himself with Carrie, and while this is partly due to the fact that Schmidt’s relationship with Carrie is socially unacceptable, Schmidt’s isolation is also due to a desire to keep his relationship with Carrie intact. But Schmidt is losing Carrie, and he knows it. He has aged (he’s in his 60s), and meanwhile Carrie is off running marathons with a local bodyguard.

An eccentric millionaire, Mr Mansour, moves into the area, and immediately zooms in on Schmidt. In spite of Schmidt’s attempts to avoid Mansour, a relationship begins to develop between the two men, and Schmidt finds that his life is changing once again. Schmidt, who views any change in routine as “a mountain he was at first unwilling to climb,” resists the drastic alterations in his life, but it’s inevitable that Schmidt’s life will change again.

I enjoyed Schmidt Delivered every bit as much as About Schmidt. Sequels can be very disappointing, but Schmidt Delivered met all my expectations. Characters from About Schmidt appear in the sequel and include: obnoxious in-law Renata Riker, spoiled rotten daughter Charlotte, and even Schmidt’s loyal friend Gil. As Schmidt heads into another crisis, he also comes to terms with his role as a father and as a friend. This book is full of interesting characters who captured my attention. I found the strains in Schmidt’s relationship with the amoral Carrie highly poignant, but the relationship was simultaneously portrayed without a shred of sentimentality. Schmidt remains a sympathetic and complex character.

About Schmidt by Louis Begley

“Was this a moment for altruism?”

To me, the film About Schmidt was only mildly interesting, but I was curious enough to seek out the book. I’d never read any Louis Begley books before, but his name was not unknown to me.

I should make it perfectly clear that the book About Schmidt isn’t much like the film–the main character, Schmidt, is a retired widower who has a rather bad relationship with his daughter, but there the similarities end. In the book, Albert Schmidt is a retired lawyer living in the Hamptons. His wife, Mary, has been dead for six months, and although, Albert and Mary did not have the perfect marriage, nonetheless, Albert is still recuperating and adjusting to retirement life alone.

To outsiders, Albert seems to have the perfect retirement. He lives in a multi-million dollar mansion (that belonged to his wife’s family), doesn’t appear to have any money worries, and his only daughter, Charlotte has just announced her engagement to the young dedicated lawyer, Jon Riker. Unfortunately, while Schmidt appears to lead an envious life, in reality, things are not that simple. The house is a chain around Schmidt’s neck, his pension is in jeopardy, and he can’t stand his future son-in-law. Plus Schmidt is lonely, but without Mary’s stabilizing force, Charlotte is hostile and distant. Charlotte, who is now the only person in Schmidt’s life, withdraws physically and emotionally, and she dangles herself in front of him until he agrees to Thanksgiving at the house of Jon Riker’s parents. Thanksgiving with the Rikers proves to be a major turning point for Schmidt. Will Schmidt accept the role given to him? Will Schmidt begin begging for crumbs of attention from the daughter who wants to punish him, or will he forge a new, happy life for himself?

Once I started this book, I was reluctant to put it down–this is due, in part, to my annoyance with Charlotte and her awful in-laws, the Rikers. Schmidt is handed a scripted role “tyrannical father,” and he seems powerless to act against it. Charlotte assumes the victim role and enlists the Rikers as accomplices. And their collective behaviour disgusted me beyond belief. In my opinion, Charlotte is a spoiled brat who can’t wait for her dad to die so she can get the family silver. Charlotte isn’t even a nasty character–she’s just mealy-mouthed.

The book is not without flaws. I found Schmidt’s impressive virility extremely implausible, and the author does not use quotation marks. I found it difficult at times to distinguish between a character’s thoughts and spoken words. But those complaints aside, I really enjoyed the book. It’s been a long time since I’ve actually wanted to argue with fictional characters, but Begley’s nauseating Charlotte and domineering self-righteous, therapist, Renata Riker pushed me to the limits. I wanted to smack the pair of them.

Shipwreck by Louis Begley

“Adultery is wrong only if it is discovered.”

The narrator of Louis Begley’s novel, Shipwreck is the successful author, John North. The book begins in a cafe called “L’Entre Deux Mondes” and the story is a confessional tale of North’s passionate affair with a French journalist named Lea. Bending the ear of a willing listener, North proceeds to tell the tale of his torrid relationship with Lea.

John North isn’t a particularly likeable character. He’s written a number of well-received novels and is married to a doctor named Lydia. North decided early in the marriage that having children would interfere with his creative process, and Lydia, the long-suffering, almost too saintly wife, has meekly accepted his decision. Lydia is the daughter of the disgustingly rich Frank family, and the Franks seem to feel that somehow or another North just isn’t good enough for their daughter (and they may be right). North is experiencing a crisis of sorts. After recently rereading some of his novels, he’s come to the conclusion that his writing is meaningless. North is also trying to complete another novel, “Loss” when he goes to Paris and meets Lea, a writer for Vogue magazine.

North begins an affair with Lea. At first, he persuades himself that he’s in love with her, and he compartmentalizes his two relationships–Lydia in New York, and Lea conveniently located on another continent. A great deal of the novel dwells on the logistics of the affair in Paris.

All this passion comes to a screeching halt when North returns to his life in New York, and North admits that his ardour wanes once out of Lea’s grip: “Lea had been consigned, without a conscious decision on my part, to a forgotten, out-of-the way suburb of my affections. It was not a place I visited.” North tires of Lea, and finds “like certain other fine products of France, her charm didn’t travel well.”

In spite of his sporadic lack of enthusiasm, North continues the affair deftly juggling the two women. Lea shows North off to her Parisian friends who view the famous writer as “a special treat, a sort of human baked Alaska.” The question whether or not North can sustain both relationships and produce novels at the same time carries the reader to the novel’s conclusion.

The egotistical narrator sees himself as the only important person on the planet, and the author conveys this idea successfully. As a result, the characters of Lydia and Lea are only vessels for North’s pleasure. North simply never cares what his wife thinks (as long as he’s not caught), so her innermost thoughts remain uninteresting to North and therefore are not revealed to the reader. The women in North’s life might as well be inflatable dummies trooped out and brought to life only when North pays attention to them. While it may be argued that this flat treatment of the other characters is deliberate on the part of the author, nonetheless, the novel suffers as a result. Additionally, the entire device of North baring his soul in the cafe to someone who may or may not really exist is annoying. There were several moments when I forgot North is supposed to be confessing all this, and when I was reminded of this bizarre, surreal encounter, the breaks in the story were a bit distracting. As a structure device, it is annoying and heavy-handed. In spite of its flaws, however, Begley produced a highly readable, well-written book that proves interesting to the last page.