SOURCE: McAlpin, Heller. “An Emptiness Worse Than Death.” Los Angeles Times (19 October 1998): 5.

In the following review, McAlpin provides a mixed assessment of Begley's Mistler's Exit.

When Thomas Mistler, the anti-hero of Louis Begley's fifth novel [Mistler's Exit], read Anna Karenina as a boy, he impressed his father by sympathizing with Anna's husband, Karenin. His father, an investment banker whose sense of duty kept him from running off with the young Frenchwoman he loved, commented, “That's a very grown-up response, to sympathize with an unattractive man who is in an impossible situation.”

Mistler is an unattractive man in an impossible situation. He is a privileged, cultivated advertising mogul born “with a silver spoon stuck firmly in his mouth,” who is diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer at 60. If the task Begley set for himself in Mistler's Exit was to render Mistler sympathetic, he has failed miserably. Mistler is outwardly successful...