SOURCE: Duplain, Julian. “Loss Adjuster.” New Statesman & Society 6, no. 235 (15 January 1993): 39.

In the following review, Duplain applauds Begley's precise descriptions of places in The Man Who Was Late.

Two years ago Louis Begley published his first novel, Wartime Lies, the story of a Jewish boy in eastern Poland who survived the Holocaust, almost alone from his family, by a mixture of assimilation and blind cunning. The horror was narrated from a distance of 40 years, across the Atlantic, by a reticent man with “a nice face and sad eyes” who nowadays reveals his suffering past only in the line of his jaw, never in conversation.

The Man Who Was Late is an oblique sequel. Ben, Harvard graduate and the consummate American banker, is not the Maciek who survived the Warsaw Uprising, but the hints of a central European ghetto history are there. There's the name, of course, and his voice...