Arts+ Selects
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
MATTERS OF HONOR
By Louis Begley
Louis Begley is one of the best American novelists, but no one would accuse him of being the most lovable. His books do not engage the reader with that puppyish, garrulous, finally evasive sincerity which, since the eclipse of postmodernism and minimalism has been the favorite mode of younger fiction writers. Rather Mr. Begley leads his reader in a minuet of ironies, a delicate dialectic of concealment and revelation. His narrators, who are always his surrogates, tend to be remote slightly sinister figures, estranged from the reader by the very power and sophistication they so jealously guard. Mistler in “Mistler’s Exit,” dying luxuriously in Venice, or the misanthropic Schmidt in “About Schmidt,” are not the kind of men we expect to find at the center of American novels. “Matters of Honor,” Mr. Begley’s terrifically intelligent, moving, and entertaining new novel, is not just his best book since “Wartime Lies.” It is also the book that brings his entire achievement as a novelist into focus. That is because it deals, in typically indirect fashion, with Mr. Begley’s own passage from child to adult, European to American, powerlessness to power, poverty to wealth. It shows how a man very like Mr. Begley pursues and claims the prizes that we find on Mr. Begley’s own CV. (Long before he became a novelist, he was a powerful partner at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton.) And it contemplates, with an almost scandalous perspicuity, the terrible price of that success.
Adam Kirsch
THE AENEID
By Virgil
Translated by Robert Fagles
The poet Virgil was famed for licking his verses into shape the way a mother bear licks her newborn cub to give it form. He was rough and meticulous at once. He spoke Latin like a yokel, except when he was declaiming poetry. In his new translation, Mr. Fagles isn’t as interested in the sonorous line or passage as he is in the hurtling energy of “The Aeneid.” He approvingly quotes C.S. Lewis’s remark on the “enormous onward pressure” of the poem and he conveys this pressure superbly.
Eric Ormsby
