SOURCE: Edwards, Thomas R. “Palm Beach Story.” New York Review of Books 43, no. 17 (31 October 1996): 63-5.

In the following review, Edwards discusses Begley's first three novels, asserting that About Schmidt is second in quality only to Wartime Lies.

The burden of Louis Begley's first novel, Wartime Lies (1991), was the dependence of life, in extreme conditions and perhaps ordinary ones too, on falsehood. Drawing on the author's childhood experiences, it tells how a seven-year-old Jewish boy called Maciek, with the help of his resourceful young aunt, survives the German occupation of Poland in World War II by pretending to be what he is not. The book was deservedly praised, and the literary debut it marked seemed all the more remarkable for coming from someone then in his late fifties who was not a professional writer but a successful New York lawyer, and whose native tongue was not English.

Maciek begins...