SOURCE: Annan, Gabriele. “Pricks and Kicks.” New York Review of Books 45, no. 17 (5 November 1998): 44-6.

In the following excerpt, Annan proposes that in Mistler's Exit the ennui and dispassion in the narrative voice makes readers less interested in the protagonist's impending death.

The novels by Louis Begley and Tim Parks, one American, the other English, present a violent contrast in tempo, temperament, and tone, and yet they have a lot in common. The half-hidden theme in both is free will: or rather its absence, which both heroes come to recognize and furiously resent. Both are highly cultivated, well-read, self-aware WASP males exercising their considerable sensibilities in Europe. Parks's Jerry is a middle-class English academic; Begley's Mistler [in Mistler's Exit] an upper-crust New Yorker. Jerry is the first-person narrator in Europa, whereas Mistler's Exit is written in the third person. It makes very little difference: everything that happens in Louis...