SOURCE: Alexander, Victoria N. “Louis Begley: Trying to Make Sense of It.” Antioch Review 55, no. 3 (summer 1997): 292-304.

In the following essay, Alexander considers the use of irony in Begley's novels, asserting that the most sympathetic characters undergo difficult and painful experiences, but that Schmidt, Begley's least appealing character, is extremely fortunate.

Louis Begley's first novel, Wartime Lies (1991), a semi-autobiographical account of a well-born Jewish boy who is able to elude the Nazis by purchasing a false identity, won the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize, and the Prix Médicis Etranger. Begley, then fifty-eight, head of the international department of the prestigious law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, was celebrated as much for his interesting background as for his writing. Though he has been correctly recognized as one of this century's most elegant and urbane stylists, too much, I think, is made of his leisured lifestyle...