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Why should readers care about this cold fish? For one thing, everyone else who moves within his snug world of sizable inheritances and tax-free municipal bonds, golden handshakes and summer houses, is just as blithely venal. If Schmidt's emotional distance has hurt his one child, a daughter, she is quick to gain every advantage of property rights. Her aggressive fiance is equally adept at maximizing and reshaping the dowry. The law firm's head, supposedly an old friend, matches Schmidt's scorn for his intellect with maneuvers designed to humiliate.
Furthermore, Schmidt does have the capacity to learn and change, even when inventing a new life means completely abandoning all ties to family, social class, and familiar surroundings.
Flashbacks reveal that Schmidt skewed his famously close marriage into half-truth by sleeping with the help. His careerism probably ruined his relationship with his daughter. He accepted, and helped perpetuate, a philistine elite that judges human beings solely by their accumulation of capital, titles on the door, and inside skinny on the secret mechanisms of power.
Inevitably, his world sets Schmidt aside as his influence and money ebb, but he does not go humbly into chuckling old-fogeydom. Throughout, even in scenes with the manipulative mother of his future son-in-law, we see that the lawyer's well-pressed exterior conceals a boiling libido: will he love passionately, and be passionately loved in return, ever again? The answer, which should not be revealed in a review, is both unlikely and cleverly calibrated. When a woman appears who is too perfect for an old man's fantasy, too neatly Schmidt's opposite in bed and out, Begley musters dark rumblings that portend disaster, including the first of two convenient deaths. Then Schmidt has a colossal windfall, a reward less from life than from the novelist, which enables him to thumb his perfectly straight nose at everyone who has discounted or discarded him. About Schmidt ends in triumph; the man who seemed, by certain standards, to have it all now gets even more of it.
Does this shamelessly cheery ending rank Begley among idle romancers? Not at all. The novel is a grimly witty, credible examination of a flawed, disappointed prince of privilege. His bumbling prejudices define a class that is not given to reflection, but Schmidt himself learns, if slowly, that humanity is a matter of human qualities, not bank accounts. Such insight may not be world-shaking, but Begley's gift for finding moral weight within the vanities of the well-to-do makes About Schmidt a serious examination of one smug lawyer's forced discovery that sharing life is, for him, the richest of worldly trophies.
Charles Flowers, who lives in Purdy's, New York, received the NY Press Association's Best Column Award for his art and drama criticism.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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