SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “Peacetime Lies.” New York Review of Books 40, no. 3 (28 January 1993): 16-17.

In the following review, Annan explores overt and subtle references to such classic authors as Rainer Maria Rilke, and Marcel Proust in The Man Who Was Late, praising Begley's structure and tone, and asserting that his writing is becoming more polished.

Louis Begley published his first novel last year. It was autobiographical, about a young Jewish boy in occupied Poland being coached to pass as a Christian, and succeeding. It was called Wartime Lies. The new novel [The Man Who Was Late] is in many ways a sequel, and could well be called Peacetime Lies. The hero is a postwar Jewish child immigrant. Back home his father was a respected lawyer and he himself “the Little Lord Fauntleroy of a Central European town.” In New Jersey they are disoriented and poor.

The boy, Ben, is...