Albert Schmidt - or Schmidtie, as he prefers to be called - has
reached a watershed in his life, a time when his dinner jacket and
his overcoat will outlive him, and he must take stock. His
much-loved wife is dead, he has retired from his job as a
prestigious New York lawyer and his indulged daughter is engaged to
one of his ex-colleagues. Behind the surface, darker truths emerge:
Schmidtie was an unfaithful husband, a lawyer whose earning power
was waning, and he can't quite bring himself to admit that he
disapproves of his future son-in-law because he is Jewish. As he
distastefully considers the physical, practical and emotional
problems that getting older brings, he looks back nostalgically to
the past, almost a golden age for him of fleeting sexual
encounters, professional standing and a comfortable civilized life,
a time before the changes of the modern world, where his daughter
no longer eats 'proper' food, her fiance never reads a book unless
it's to do with work, and smokers are treated like criminals. Louis
Begley writes fluently, perceptively and with a barbed wit about a
lonely man who is seemingly out of step with the world around him
and who does not hide his feelings of alienation. ('It will be
plain by now that bonhomie was not one of Schmidt's
characteristics.') The one person he feels some connection with is
Carrie, the young Puerto Rican waitress at a local restaurant.
Suddenly she initiates a passionate affair and Schmidt begins to
see things in a different light. Schmidt arouses our pity, and
irritates and amuses us: Louis Begley has written wisely and well
about a dying world and what we can do with the time we have left.
(Kirkus UK)
Albert Schmidt is a retired lawyer who misses his recently deceased
wife, has an unhealthy diet, is a mild anti-Semite and owns a nice
home in the Hamptons he feels compelled to offer to his daughter as
a wedding present. Said daughter, Charlotte, is a yuppie in all the
worst ways. She handles public relations for tobacco companies,
doesn't want the house in the Hamptons, and is about to marry a
buttoned-up Jewish lawyer. Schmidt, who had built a very lucrative
career on his ability to be 'always demonstrably and impeccably
right', begins to feel the first stirrings of self-doubt and, to
his own astonishment, finds himself beginning an affair with a
frank, exuberant waitress, a woman younger than his daughter. The
conflict takes off from there in this finely told tale of
retirement, inheritance, sex and death.
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