I borrowed About Schmidt from our local library because I had seen and enjoyed the Alexander Payne movie, even though it starred Jack Nicholson, who was once again -- yet once more -- still another time -- reprising J. J. Gittes Redux. There was however only the most marginal connection between novel and film. In the film, Warren Schmidt is a insurance executive in Omaha whose nasty wife has recently died and whose Denver daughter is about to be married to an asbestos salesman. In the novel, Albert Schmidt. an upper-class Harvard/New York/Hamptons lawyer for a white shoe firm, has recently retired, and has lost his beloved, talented and patient wife to a brain tumor. He fusses endlessly about money, of which he has a more-than-ample supply. His major problem is that he don't much like Jews, and that his daughter is about to marry one (a young partner in his law firm). She (the daughter) teases her father with the possibility that she's going to convert to Judaism. Schmidt has a nasty streak but he's a good man underneath it all and one who can return blow-for-blow and flirt for flirt. It appears that redemption from his narrowness will come through an affair with a twenty-year-old Boriquena who doesn't much care about money and who introduces him to a new world of modern sexuality. Just when the novel seems unable to conclude, Schmidt receives a large enabling bequest from his father's second wife and all his financial problems are solved. Thesaurus ex machina, so to speak. Inasmuch as the novel seems to look askance at Schmidt's money worries, it seems odd that it should end with a triumphant, and I suppose comic, infusion of additional cash. I didn't find the conclusion to be satisfying.
The relationship between Schmidt and his daughter is stressful and painful and rings true -- it's the best thing in the book. It's a wonder that the movie version neglected such rich material. My suspicion (I have no evidence to offer) is that the perpetrators re-shaped the novel into a vehicle for Jack N. I hope that Louis Begley, the author of this urbane tale, was amply rewarded for the use of the novel's title, because the movie made almost nothing of the plot, or the characters, or the dialogue, or the ambience.
It's a good book -- and certainly intriguing enough to send me scurrying back to the library for other novels by Louis Begley.
Comments