SOURCE: Hepburn, Allan. “Lost Time: Trauma and Belatedness in Louis Begley's The Man Who Was Late.” Contemporary Literature 39, no. 3 (fall 1998): 380-404.

In the following essay, Hepburn discusses The Man Who Was Late within a psychoanalytic context and in relation to postmodern literary thought.

After graduating from Harvard with a degree in English in 1954 and a degree in law in 1959, Louis Begley began a career as a lawyer with the firm Debevoise and Plimpton in New York City, specializing in international corporate law.¹ Belatedly, Begley published his first novel, Wartime Lies, in 1991. Making up for lost time, he has completed three other novels in quick succession: The Man Who Was Late (1993), As Max Saw It (1994), and About Schmidt (1996). Lateness in starting a literary career—speech after long silence from a Polish-born writer who witnessed the arrest and deportation of European Jews—attests to the difficulty of finding the appropriate...