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About Schmidt
About Schmidt
About Schmidt
Audiobook8 hours

About Schmidt

Written by Louis Begley

Narrated by George Guidall

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

3/5

()

About this audiobook

Louis Begley's perceptive novel hums with emotional energy and shimmers with haunting images. A National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist, About Schmidt is a powerful meditation on loneliness, desire, and transformation. Old-school lawyer Albert Schmidt has spent years carefully climbing the ladder of success. But now, at what should be the pinnacle of his career, his life is in chaos. Within months, he is widowed and forcibly retired from his firm. He harbors painfully mixed feelings about his ambitious daughter's impending marriage. Suddenly, in the midst of this turmoil, a seductive young woman asks Smitty what he wants. Far from being a time of satisfaction and complacency, the middle age encountered by Begley's hero is the beginning of a new journey tantalizing, yet unnerving. From the first step, Begley draws the reader deeply into a man's quest for new ways to understand an unstable world.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJan 21, 2010
ISBN9781456124021
About Schmidt
Author

Louis Begley

Born in Poland in 1933, Louis Begley is the author of many novels, including Wartime Lies, About Schmidt and Shipwreck. His wife of thirty years, biographer Anka Muhlstein is the author of La Salle: Explorer of the North American Frontier and, most recently, A Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine. They live in New York.

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Reviews for About Schmidt

Rating: 3.110294147058824 out of 5 stars
3/5

68 ratings3 reviews

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This a book that burrows into your consciousness and is never forgotten. Having read it when it was first published, I was sucked in by Begley’s writing and by Schmidt., especially his take of retirement: “…a race of men—all federal and state and bank employees, and most dentists—who are born to retire. They aspire to retirement from the moment they are born.” (True and hilarious.)

    Twenty-six years later, I listened to it again and was as absorbed as I was the first time. One of those books that lives in you.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The setting here is very, one might say supremely, bourgeois. Albert Schmidt, newly widowed, recently retired from a cutthroat Manhattan law firm, is fully fitted out with all the appurtenances of great material success. The circles in which he moves are peopled by the very rich and often famous. Six months after his wife's death his daughter, Charlotte, announces her engagement to Jon Riker. Riker, a former mentee, is disliked by Schmidt for numerous reasons. One reason being that he's a Jew. More objectionable to Schmidt, however, is that Riker has knowingly undermined him at the firm where he no longer works. Schmidt has lost his beloved wife, Mary, and now he is losing his daughter to a grasping young man devoid of the romantic sensibilities that he most cherishes. Schmidt feels himself to be a radical truth teller, yet much of his "commentary" he must repress if he is not to alienate those around him. One wonders how he has done it. One wonders how he has managed to be successful. Interpersonal relationships are so key to the high-brow kind of law he once practiced, yet they also annoy him terribly. The answer of course is Mary. Often we hear Schmidt say something like "Mary would have managed it so well." And our sense is of his wife coming along behind him setting matters to rights. There are improbable sex scenes--two sixty-plus men with 20 year old girlfriends--yet somehow Begley carries them off. Certainly, the fact that both men are very rich makes the liaisons more plausible than they would be otherwise. I generally abhor all descriptions of coitus in print. Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater is to my mind full of such repulsive writing. Begley's method however is defter and almost without vulgarity. I haven't quite figured out how he does it. I suppose one could say that Begley writes about territory already covered by John Updike and Philip Roth. Yet Begley's style is distinctive, nothing like the other two writers, and his milieu is far more genteel. I absolutely adore this novel. It's my favorite of all the Begley novels I've read so far, including Wartime Lies, which is saying a lot.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Retirement and growing old are shown to be not as easy as they may seem, as Schmidt deals with the death of his wife, new relationships, isolation, thinking about the past, his own prejudices and the impending marriage of his daughter. This book didn't appeal to me at all at the beginning, but it grew on me towards the end.