SOURCE: Mars-Jones, Adam. “Ascending to Gentility.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4686 (22 January 1993): 19.

In the following review, Mars-Jones questions Begley's ability to successfully balance the dispassion of the wealthy with the façade of sophistication that the protagonist in The Man Who Was Late strives to obtain.

Ben, the protagonist of The Man Who Was Late, misses not mundane appointments—planes, trains, buses if he was the class of man to take them—but the highest kind of existential rendezvous, the meeting with his best self. He marries, for instance, the mother of young twins; infertile himself, he puts his heart and soul into stepfatherhood, but when the marriage breaks up he discovers that love confers no rights. He was too late to be loved back.

Ben's subsequent history is recounted by his old friend Jack (they overlapped at Harvard, but became friends only later), sharer of regular lunches down...