Inventing The Self

By R.Z. Sheppard

TITLE: THE MAN WHO WAS LATE

AUTHOR: LOUIS BEGLEY

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 243 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: A novel of manners that artfully reveals the hidden torment of a man who never quite belonged.

Louis Begley's first novel, Wartime Lies, drew on his childhood as a Polish Jew who escaped the Nazi death camps by living as a Gentile. Assimilating to survive is quite different from assimilating to succeed. Begley did both. After the war, he emigrated to the U.S., went to Harvard and prospered as a Manhattan lawyer before turning to fiction. The Man Who Was Late follows his first book by less than two years, suggesting that Begley, nearing 60, has undertaken a literary career with some urgency.

Beneath its polished surface, this novel of love, taste and manners is a profound tale of shame and self-destruction. Begley is a fine technician who employs proven devices: the narrator who feeds gossip to readers as if they were old lunch companions; the private letters and journal entries that reveal the hidden flaws in an outwardly flawless character.

That would be a gentleman named Ben, a deceased international banker, a postwar Jewish refugee from Central Europe who earned a degree from Harvard and eventually entry into New York City's world of high finance. As depicted by Begley, Ben's adopted circle is a meritocracy whose members are as likely to be related by school as by ethnic and family background. Connections are not unimportant. Jack, Ben's best friend and the novel's narrator, is a writer for a weekly newsmagazine, a social credential so marginal that he is also given a Harvard degree, a blood tie to the Alsops and a genteel avocation of writing a book about the Indians of Maine.

The larger point is that Jack takes his white, Anglo-Saxon status for / granted, while his late friend was self-conscious about his position. "Ben liked to joke that he was his own invention and therefore never could be certain how he really felt about anything or anybody," Jack confides, along with his supply of juicy details about Ben's business and sleeping arrangements.

They are impressive and take place on three continents and in Japan. In addition to local color, Begley throws in a few tips about doing business abroad. Beware Brazilians, he warns. They can be good companions but unreliable partners. Also, when negotiating far from home, Ben never set a departure deadline, "so that the other side was face-to-face with the dull prospect of his insisting on every point however long it took to resolve it."

But time is not always a dependable ally. Like young Maciek in Wartime Lies, Ben can never come to terms with his tragic past. It drains his personal attachments and achievements of their joy and meaning. Excerpts from his correspondence and unmailed jottings fill up with foreboding and descriptions of himself as "barren, dark and desperate."

The guilt of the survivor is a familiar psychological construct. That observation could be applied to the novel, but would not do justice to Begley's imagination and authority as a writer. Ben's feelings about his escape from the Holocaust and his transformation into an affluent non-Jewish Jew in America are complex and ironic. He is too intelligent to misinterpret his problem but too emotionally bottled up to solve it. Begley shares some of his resume with Ben, but he has not written an autobiography. The Man Who Was Late is a what-if novel -- specifically, What if the author could not have sufficiently distanced himself from the past to discover the healing powers of fiction?