Memories of a Marriage

Starred review from April 22, 2013
In this compact, voyeuristic novel, Begley (About Schmidt) creates his latest larger-than-life character in the beguiling but sharp-tongued socialite Lucy De Bourgh. During the spring of 2003, elderly narrator Phillip, a successful literary novelist, is attending the New York City Ballet when he bumps into Lucy, an old friend and occasional lover from his carefree days in 1950s Paris. A striking beauty and wealthy Rhode Island blueblood, Lucy charmed with her personality and humor and disregarded Eisenhower-era mores with her easy sexuality. Lucy now seems bitter, however, and shocks Phillip by calling her late ex, Thomas Snow, a “monster.” Although coming from blue-collar roots, Thomas attended Harvard, made his fortune as a savvy investment banker, and after the divorce, died in a boating accident. A lonely widower, Phillip becomes fascinated with Lucy and Thomas’s divorce, perhaps seeing a future novel in their breakup. Possibly, though, he just finds titillation in Lucy’s sensational past. Begley’s effortless storytelling will have readers equally fascinated by Lucy and Phillips’s complex, tangled relationship. Agent: Georges Borchardt, George Borchardt Inc.

June 1, 2013
Autumn turns to winter in this novel about an author of the novelist's own generation, who reflects upon (among other things) the complex relationships between fiction and life, memory and truth. The latest from the venerable Begley (Schmidt Steps Back, 2012, etc.) lacks the scope and dark humor of his multivolume "Schmidtie" saga, but it is nonetheless as sharply observed and subtly nuanced as most of his writing in its focus on class distinctions and destiny among the Eastern elite. It could pass as a novel from F. Scott Fitzgerald's later decades, if Fitzgerald had lived so long. Its protagonist is Philip, an author of previously greater note, a widower who dearly misses his late wife, who was also a writer. Attending a ballet, he runs into an heiress whose reputation was compromised by her wild, erratic streak and whose ex-husband had died in an accident after a divorce that still left her bitter. Her name is Lucy, and Philip had once slept with her, which seems like a minor plot detail, because everyone had. The bulk of the narrative finds Lucy telling her version of her troubled courtship with and marriage to Thomas Snow, who was then her social inferior but later eclipsed her as a renowned businessman and economist. Both their son and the younger, prettier woman Thomas married after divorcing Lucy provide far different perspectives on the relationship, and those conflicting memories obsess Philip, who wants to fill in the blanks, untwist the contradictions and likely even write a novel with this marriage as raw material. (Perhaps even this very novel that Begley has written?) "But the book would be a novel," he assures Lucy, "not a memoir or reportage...a mosaic, made of slivers of glass or stone, some picked up as I went along and some I had fabricated." Since most of this novel is narrated through paraphrase--the protagonist's spin on what he heard the other characters say--the reader must decide how much he can trust the narrator, a man in despair over "the utter futility of my existence, the books I was writing included." Less interesting as a novel than as insight into the mind of a novelist.

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June 1, 2013

In this latest glimpse of the upper-crust terrain Begley knows so well (About Schmidt), a chance encounter at the ballet sends Philip on a book-long inquiry into the mental health and veracity of seventyish former debutante Lucy de Bourgh, the daughter of one of Rhode Island's first families. Philip, a successful novelist and the story's narrator, had known Lucy in their richly privileged youth, when she was a bit of a wildcat, promiscuous even. Lucy surprised all by marrying Thomas Snow, the Harvard- and London School of Economics-educated son of a garage owner and a bookkeeper. Thomas would become ultrarich, a world-renowned banker, but after the marriage failed, Lucy portrayed him as a social climber and "monster" (sexually, it seems). Philip, who knew Thomas well, tries to determine the truth; Lucy's erratic behavior should tip him off more than it does, especially when all other characters, including a well-centered second wife, see Thomas as kind and thoughtful. The "monster" question is ultimately never settled; at end as at beginning, it's all about egomaniac Lucy. VERDICT For ardent Fitzgeraldian Auchinclossians: take with caviar, Veuve Clicquot, a fine cigar, and white gloves for the ladies, please.--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2013
Begley sets aside his ongoing saga about attorney Schmidt, last seen in Schmidt Steps Back (2012), to unleash a fiendishly clever, Fitzgeraldesque tale about marriage, friendship, gossip, and self-justification. Urbane and methodical writer Philip has barely recovered from the deaths of his beloved daughter and wife. Finally reconciled to solitude in Manhattan, he is intrigued and dismayed to be accosted by Lucy De Bourgh at the ballet and is subsequently shocked and fascinated by what time and anger have done to her. Born into a blue-blood Rhode Island clan, exuberantly sexy and entitled Lucy rebelliously married a man she hoped everyone would think was beneath her. Now alone, vitriolic, and alcoholic, she insists on telling Philip the story of her disastrous marriage in aggressively explicit detail. Others in their privileged circle step up to share their versions of the sordid entanglement, fully aware that they are providing Philip with explosive material. Begley, marvelously droll and possessed of a rapier wit, revels in his mercurial characters, intricate psychological puzzles, unreliable memories, counterintuitive class divisions, and all the mysteries and miseries of lust and love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)