SOURCE: Pritchard, William H. “Fiction Rules.” Hudson Review 51, no. 4 (winter 1999): 764-65.

In the following excerpt, Pritchard provides a positive review of Mistler's Exit, asserting that Begley incorporates strong narrative skills within a compelling tale.

I have it on reliable authority that Louis Begley, whose Holocaust memoir Wartime Lies (1991) won much acclaim, was graduated as one of the two summa degrees in the Harvard College class of 1954, the other being John Updike. For decades Begley contented himself with being a New York City lawyer, then in this decade has come forth with a series of books, among which his last one, About Schmidt (1996), is an especially compelling and witty piece of novel-making. The new one, Mistler's Exit, is only a shade less good, which puts it well beyond the reach of most practitioners. Head of a highly successful advertising agency, Thomas Mistler discovers in his sixties that he has...