SOURCE: Kessler, Julia Braun. “Survivors' Shadows.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (24 January 1993): 3, 7.

In the following review, Kessler focuses on the psychological state of Ben, the protagonist in The Man Who Was Late, and probes Ben's relationship with Jack, the narrator.

Ghosts hover over Louis Begley's second novel, The Man Who Was Late. Quite soon it begins to seem as if the most prominent among them is his own.

Begley's Wartime Lies, which appeared in 1991, was a stunning first book, nominated for prestigious prizes—the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and others. Its account of a boy's torturous evasion of the Holocaust in Poland, of the lives he and his aunt invented to survive, was praised not only for its unflinching authenticity as witness to the event, but for its sustained lyric power. Critics even compared the style of this writer-turned-lawyer with geniuses as diverse...