So What Is It About Schmidt?
"Thou hast neither youth nor age; but, as it were, an after dinner
sleep, dreaming on both."
— Shakespeare, Measure For Measure
Louis Begley's fourth novel was originally published in the States in 1996. Now British readers can get to grips with his challenging and entertaining style as About Schmidt is made available in the UK to accompany the release of Alexander Payne's film version of the novel. Begley has commented in media interviews on the difficulty of filming his novels, which rely heavily on what he calls "interior dialogue", a kind of internalised third-person narration that has to be drastically altered in order to be viable in the visual medium.
The novel itself is thoroughly rewarding and grips the attentive reader
within the first few pages. Character is meticulously constructed here
in a tour de force of narratorial skill, so that we develop our
sympathies for Schmidt even as we learn more and more deeply the
disturbing, destructive sides of his personality. He's not so much a
lovable rogue as a self-deceiving charmer, a wise fool whose effects
ripple far beyond his actions.
Schmidt is a retired lawyer living in some wealth on Long Island in a
house largely empty after the recent death of his wife. His
relationships with his daughter and with the man his daughter will
marry constitute the bulk of Schmidt's preoccupations through the
novel. Or rather, his continual worrying away at the financial
implications of her marriage and its effects on his own monetary
position constitute the primary things he is concerned with. For
Schmidt, like many of us, is a master at making his own interests
disappear into the disguise of concern for someone else, and it's in
this process of deception that the charms of the character, and the
skill of the novelist, reside.
Not for one minute is the reader allowed to have any illusions about
Schmidt and his obsessions. He feels aggrieved at his treatment by the
firm he worked for all his life; he's aggrieved that his wife is no
longer with him; he's aggrieved that his daughter will marry a younger
lawyer who, all too clearly, mirrors Schmidt himself, although he could
never admit it; and above all, he carries a burden he can barely
acknowledge, the taint of his own personal prejudices.
There's a rather shadowy character in About Schmidt who's
referred to at one point as the law firm's "ubiquitous Lew Brenner",
their "own Jewish Al Pacino". Begley is a Jewish Pole, who survived the
war and the Nazi occupation of Poland by masquerading as a Catholic.
Begley now lives a double life as a novelist and a lawyer. He shares
his initials with Lew Brenner, and perhaps shares too Brenner's subtly
implied point of view of Schmidt himself.
Schmidt's semi-acknowledged racism, his tendency to ascribe all
professional slights and changes in the constituency of his form to
Jewish influence, suggests a level of allegory that Begley's novel only
offers hints at. While it is no Marathon Man, About
Schmidt is a deeply thoughtful and carefully modulated examination
of the kinds of self-deception and denial that characterise a
particular generation that has been moulded by its experience of
twentieth century history. All of Schmidt's residual guilt and
self-loathing is redirected into anxieties about his relationship with
his daughter, a relationship that gradually crumbles into increasingly
indirect forms of communication. The relationship is sketched with
something of the moral comedy of a Charles Dickens or a George Eliot,
with occasional macabre undertones. Schmidt writes to Charlotte, late
in the novel:
Since I am not dead yet I don't think you will get Mom's
and my silver just yet. I will send candelabra, trays, and such like
that belonged to Aunt Martha. You may not recall it, but your mother
gave Martha's table silver to one of her assistants as a wedding
present. That would have been about five years ago. For the same reason
-- my being alive -- I will have to go over the list of furniture you
want and decide what I can send to you without changing the look of the
rooms here. [.] Shouldn't I send a copy of Charlotte's letter to
Renata? Schmidt asked himself. She has the tape. If she gets the
letter, she'll be starting a real collection. In the end, he didn't do
it: he felt too ashamed.
Schmidt's letter moves uneasily between a kind of outrage at his
daughter's grasping mentality, embarrassment at his own covetousness,
and a glimmering awareness that, for all his faults, he remains somehow
in the right, and morally superior to the self-serving younger
generation -- after all, he has at least worked for what he has. One of
Begley's themes, in delineating his central character in this way, is
the establishment of the elderly as central protagonists in the world
of the young, who remain rather less realised figures in About
Schmidt. Schmidt's patriarchal and paternal authority in the social
world of the novel rests almost entirely on his wealth being greater
than that of those younger than him, who are continually threatening to
usurp his position, his property and, ultimately, his life.
No surprise, then, that inheritance plays a central role in the novel,
and offers one aspect of its resolution. Another aspect -- the answer
to Schmidt's increasingly cantankerous loneliness -- is resolved in a
surprise love affair that spans generations, insisting that the fraught
relations of one family shouldn't be taken as exemplary. Louis Begley
displays something of Edith Wharton's finesse in tying up the loose
ends of the novel (and after all, About Schmidt is in many ways
a modern retake on the high American bourgeois society of 19th
century Old New York that Wharton so powerfully realised in The Age
of Innocence).
Begley's dense, entrancing prose does more than justice to the
complexities of a character like Schmidt: it allows Schmidt to speak to
us of what his concerns are, and in doing so, offers an important
meditation on the enduring meanings of age, maturity and experience in
a world increasingly devoted to the brevity of youth.
— 19 March 2003
