Erinnerungen an eine Ehe

by Louis Begley

Philip, ein erfolgreicher Schriftsteller, ist aus seiner Wahlheimat Paris zurück nach New York gezogen. Er hat alles verloren, was ihm lieb war, seine Frau und seine Tochter, doch nach der Trauer kam die Resignation und mit ihr auch eine neue Art von Leichtigkeit. Philip lebt in seinen Erinnerungen, ein glücklicher Witwer, dem Ambitionen so fremd geworden sind wie Ängste. Dann begegnet er Lucy, einer Jugendfreundin – Lucy, die schöne Erbin, die lebenslustige und frivole junge Frau, mit der er einst mondäne Partys feierte. Jetzt ist sie eine gehässige alte Dame, die voller Verbitterung über ihre Ehe mit Thomas Snow spricht, einem sozialen Aufsteiger, von dem sie sagt, dass er ihr Leben zerstört habe. Und Philip, der ihr zunächst nur widerwillig zuhört, lässt sich infizieren von der Geschichte, die immer mehr Fragen aufwirft. Er beginnt, der Sache auf den Grund zu gehen, in der Vergangenheit zu forschen. Dabei darf er sich, anders als in seiner Jugend, nicht in Lucys Bann ziehen lassen. Banker und Anwälte, holzgetäfelte Raucherzimmer und Sommerhäuser in den Hamptons: »Erinnerungen an eine Ehe« ist ein konzentriertes, temperamentvolles Sittendrama um Liebe, Kränkung und Verrat, das Porträt einer widerspenstigen Frau und einer ganzen Gesellschaftsschicht.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Literature, Roman, Literary Fiction, Marriage

219 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Louis Begley is an American novelist.

Begley was born Ludwik Begleiter in Stryi at the time part of Poland and now in Ukraine, as the only child of a physician. He is a survivor of the Holocaust due to the multiple purchases of Aryan papers by his mother and constant evasion of the Nazis. They survived by pretending to be Polish Catholic. The family left Poland in the fall of 1946 and settled in New York in March 1947. Begley studied English Literature at Harvard College (AB '54, summa cum laude), and published in the Harvard Advocate. Service in the United States Army followed. In 1956 Begley entered Harvard Law School and graduated in 1959 (LL.B. magna cum laude).

Upon graduation from Law School, Begley joined the New York firm of Debevoise & Plimpton as an associate; became a partner in January 1968; became of counsel in January 2004; and retired in January 2007. From 1993 to 1995, Begley was also president of PEN American Center. He remains a member of PEN's board of directors, as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

His wife of 30 years, Anka Muhlstein, was honoured by the French Academy for her work on La Salle, and received critical acclaim for her book A Taste for Freedom: The Life of Astolphe de Custine.

His first novel, Wartime Lies, was written in 1989. It won the PEN/Hemingway Award for a first work of fiction in 1991. The French version, Une éducation polonaise, won the Prix Médicis International in 1992. He has also won several German literature prizes, including the Jeanette Schocken Prize in 1995 and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Literature Prize in 2000.

His novel About Schmidt was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jack Nicholson.

Reviews

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elegant is the word I'd use to describe this book. It's the story of a writer in his twilight years who reconnects to a woman from his past and begins discussing with her the circumstances surrounding the breakup of her marriage. I suppose you could say he's obsessed with their story but I think more precisely he has a desire to understand which is something, as we age, people feel more deeply. We want to know the truth and if we've matured enough it's now possible to see it more clearly and with more compassion.

Along the way the protagonist, Philip, reflects on his own life as well as reflections concerning the validity of those memories and how people and our perceptions of them change as they age. Motivation is an important element as is social context. Everyone sees the past through their own private lens and for the own reasons and each outlook is valid to a greater or lesser degree. There's also the vital choice of whether or not to be happy give in to a sense of bitterness. Even though the book is less than 200 pages long it still chugs along at a leisurely pace and at times appears to be going nowhere yet the writing held my attention because of how stylish and breezy it seems. It's so seamless that it demonstrates what a skilled writer Begley truly is.

[William · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sex among the elite WASP clubby set! Who knew?

This is somehow a good read though not an especially good book. It's hard to care much about a cadre of well-born and successful Manhattanites steeped in Harvard and not much interested in anyone else. But maybe it's interesting to know that there are people who still care about membership in exclusive social clubs. The provincialism which underlies the social setting in this book makes it difficult for the story to be one of consequence.

This is a short book and a fairly slight story about the marriage of one (and perhaps two) unlikable people. A central flaw is that everyone seems to like Philip, the narrator, but it is very hard to see why. He is pretty bland and uninteresting, even as a novelist who has been extensively published.

Still, Lucy (the wife in the marriage)is somehow interesting and the story reads like a mystery as one gets clues concerning why the marriage disintegrated, and even why it happened at all. I enjoyed watching the pieces fall into place, and so while this book lacks literary or social importance, it is somehow still a good read.

[Lorri Steinbacher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rich people problems. That about sums up the book. It was like having lunch with an aging, somewhat pompous uncle who likes to gossip about his rich, aging friends. It's not an unpleasant way to spend the afternoon, but you find yourself stifling a yawn and surreptitiously checking your watch by dessert.

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dies war das schlechtbewertetste Buch auf meinem SUB. Wenn man mit wenigen Erwartungen dran geht, wird man eher überrascht. Das ist mir mit diesem Buch passiert.
Louis Begley hat mich mit seinem Schreibstil dermaßen gefangen genommen, dass ich einen Riesenspaß bei einer Geschichte gehabt, die mich wohl ansonsten eher kalt gelassen hätte. Ich werde auf jeden Fall schauen, was der Autor noch geschrieben hat.
Lieblingszitat: Man muss mit jemandem leben, um zu erkennen, dass man ihn nicht ausstehen kann!

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am of two minds about Memories of a Marriage -- an odd little book that serves as an expose of a high end WASP marriage turned sour. On the one hand, the characters who live among its pages are types I recall meeting in books back in the 1970s and 1980s. Phillip, the narrator, and his circle are all septuagenarians and they are, without exception, extremely wealthy, 'cultured', Ivy League educated, and urbane. They are the blue chip sort of folk one used to encounter in books but I find less often these days. Our society has become so allergic to elites that we seem to recoil from telling stories about Culture Vultures. Our success stories tend to be about athletes or rich business people who 'don't read'. -- Although the characters in this particular story are starchy and not very likeable (more about that in a minute) -- they give us something, as a culture to aspire to, on occasion. We need not admire them for their personal qualities. But would it kill us to learn a bit more about grammar, art, classical music or which wine goes best with our meal?

These Old Yankee snobs could tell us proles a thing or two about how to handle the cutlery at a banquet or how to dress for a garden party. Apparently, they can also tell us some juicy stories about what goes on behind closed doors in places like Martha's Vineyard.

Phillip, a widower and writer by trade (and I use the term 'trade' loosely. Phillip has nothing in common with a tradesman) - - has returned to New York, on his own after years of living with his late wife in France. He is a 'balletomane' (I remember when words like 'balletomane' were bandied about quite often in stories -- again, recently not so much) -- and has taken it upon himself to attend a ballet performance (name dropping Peter Martens, Ballanchine and other "balletomane' fixtures) along the way. Amidst the crowd he encounters a woman from his past: the once magnetic but now aged Lucy De Bourgh. Lucy is an old Rhode Island Blue Blood. However, she had emotional problems and married beneath her class, to Thomas, the son of a garage owner.

Phillip recalls this somewhat scandalous event from his younger days and is mildly intrigued by the reappearance of Lucy. However, he also vaguely realizes that Lucy is a train wreck and that it would be wisest to keep his distance.

Lucy inveigles herself back into Phillip's life by promising to tell him 'the truth' about her marriage to Thomas 'that monster'. Phillip has nothing but benign memories of the now dead Thomas and is taken aback by Lucy's vitriol. He agrees to meet her for a series of cocktail fueled dinners so that he can bear witness to the saga of this marriage and it's dissolution.

Thus we get a sort of My Dinner With Andre set up...lots of dialogue and not a whole lot of action. (Again! Takes me back to those good days where lots of movies were set in Manhattan and featured ridiculously smart characters who talked a mile a minute about a panoply of arts and letters topics. And absolutely nothing got blown up. And there were no green screens.) -- Generally I dig this sort of thing and the pace can crawl as long as the characters and their discussions keep me amused.

In this case, the momentum of the story never picked up enough for me. We were lead through the entire book waiting for some sort of wild tell all about the depravities that might have driven Miss Lucy away from her arriviste spouse. However, the conclusion I could not help but reach was quite banal. Lucy and Thomas split up because Lucy was a complete wackadoodle.

I don't know if this constitutes as a spoiler or not..but I read all the way through this narrative and heard some 'takes' on the Lucy/Thomas marriage from more than one of Phillip's sources. (He really gets sucked into this soap opera and starts to talk to mutual acquaintances about what went down between these two.) And the reviews are in: Lucy was a high strung, snooty, deceitful and selfish handful. I could be in a room with her for about 4 minutes, tops. I disliked Lucy intensely and, since so much of the story was told through her perspective (her dead husband could rise up and tell no tales of his own), I found it difficult to enjoy the book.

If anything, I kept screaming at Phillip, who seemed a fairly sensible and decent sort, to clear the hell out before Lucy sank her claws into him. Just pour the old bird one more double and then back out the door, Philip, for god's sake!

The story just seemed to taper off at the end and it felt abrupt and anticlimactic. I did enjoy the writing style, and, as I said, the precious starchiness of the cast was an interesting change from a lot of contemporary novels. But the high class tone of the book was not enough to save it -- in my opinion -- from a somewhat ho hum wrap up.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a particularly interesting book, though it is very well-written as are all of Begley's books. It rolled along and kept me interested. No. Not interested. Just reading. Because Begley's writing moves along and brings the reader along too. Probably only for diehard Begley fans.

[Bandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a strange reading experience, because I really didn't care for the book when I first started it. I found the characters simply too pretentious, too obnoxiously rich and uppity to care about. But eventually Begley's excellent (Paul Auster like and this is a huge compliment) narration won me over. The story reads strangely autobiographical or it might just be a narration trick to establish intimacy with the reader, but it does the trick and offers exactly what the title promises, as the main protagonist, also a writer, says a book ought to do. It presents a complicated multifaceted evenly balanced and fairly unbiased portrait of a marriage, not a happy one at that. It would have been more relatable of a story had the characters been if not proletariat like at least somewhat more down to earth in terms of their lifestyles, sure, but the problems relationships face go above and beyond finances as evident here. It makes me wonder whether Begley's other works are all of these over privileged New Yorkers, but either way he's a terrific writer. He's excellent at creating multi layered realistic characters, his writing style is accessible and enjoyable, he's not prone to unnecessary verbosity and he knows how to end a book well. Recommended.

[Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

I needed something short and bland to recover from Demon Copperhead. This fitted the bill perfectly

[Ladyce West · Rating 3 out of 5]

Na capa de trás da edição brasileira de Memórias de uma casamento, somos informados de que aqui encontraremos um olhar profundo sobre uma classe e seus privilégios, numa trama que se desenvolve entre Paris e Nova York, Long Island e Newport. Coroando essa apresentação, como que para justificá-la temos uma citação atribuída ao Washington Post: Entre os escritores contemporâneos, Begley talvez seja o crítico mais sagaz e devastador do sistema de classes da sociedade americana. Nada mais ilusório. Ainda que os personagens dessa narrativa sejam pessoas da classe social mais alta nos EUA, o foco está no retrato de uma mulher, complexa, vazia, intolerante, fútil, provavelmente ninfomaníaca, certamente desequilibrada emocionalmente. Como ela, existem centenas de outras em qualquer classe social. Ela causa danos a qualquer grupo familiar. Não importa, na verdade, onde nasceu, em que família, com quem casou. Tipos como o dela não precisam ser da mais alta sociedade. Eles existem em todo canto.

Louis Begley é fiel a dois de seus predecessores: Henry James, grande mestre da literatura americana de final de século, também produziu, como mandava o seu tempo, romances retratando tipos de mulher: Portrait of a Lady; Daisy Miller vêm à mente; enquanto Louis Auchincloss, já em pleno século XX, também se esmerou nesse gênero como o fez em Sybil, The Dark Lady e outros. No Brasil, deste autor, encontramos em tradução: A infinita variedade dessa mulher mais um de seus perfis de mulher. Curiosamente, ambos Henry James e Louis Auchincloss se especializaram nos retratos de mulheres das classes sociais mais altas dos EUA. No Brasil, a tradição literária dos perfis de mulher, não se limita às classes mais altas, mas, como nos EUA, começa no século XIX, com Machado de Assis [Helena] e sobretudo com José de Alencar [Senhora, Diva, Lucíola, entre outros].

Ficam por aí as comparações. Ainda que a prosa de Louis Begley seja agradável e os olhos corram sem obstáculos pelo texto, a apresentação da personagem principal Lucy De Bourgh, herdeira de mais de uma família importante da Nova Inglaterra,formada por pessoas vindas no Mayflower e no Arabella, portanto entre os primeiros a chegar no continente americano, é monótona. Não há diálogos nestas 194 páginas. Há monólogos de Lucy, de Jane. Há cartas. Em suma, falta dinamismo no texto. Temos diversos relatos, por diferentes pessoas. Contudo o texto flui. Não só por habilidade do autor, mas também pela malévola e mórbida curiosidade despertada no leitor para saber sobre os detalhes, tintim por tintim, do malfadado casamento, onde o respeito pelo próximo é inexistente.

Tivesse Louis Begley usado de outros meios para narrar talvez pudesse ter despertado maior interesse nesta leitora. Como está, trata-se de uma obra um tanto medíocre se comparada às anteriores, principalmente Sobre Schmidt e Schmidt Recua.

[Jillwilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s seductive reading about the lives of the rich and famous, even if they’re fictional. It’s like having the doorman of a Fifth Avenue apartment let you into the plush, muted, old money, high ceilinged gorgeousness of wealth and entitlement. That’s what it’s like reading this book – a little delicious – we are let into an exclusive club. Temporarily. Our entrée into this world is via Philip, an aging writer who unexpectedly meets Lucy, a friend of his youth, a woman who when she was young, was filled with charm and energy. When Philip mentions his regret about her divorce from her husband, Thomas Snow, she replies: “What do you mean! I couldn’t have gone on living with that monster.” Philip is surprised and intrigued by this comment – and so the novel unfolds around his attempts to reach the ”truth” of it, and of Lucy’s marriage. However, as this reviewer says “The pleasures of this novel reside not so much in where the “truth” lies as in its context. The world of the highly entitled at play and at work — seen traveling the globe over the decades, installing themselves in European hotels and joining exclusive men’s clubs and marrying into families made up of “very much our kind of people” — remains irresistible. Says Lucy of her wedding: “The house, the lawn, the garden, had never looked better. Lester Lanin came himself and made a little speech about still remembering the time he played at my parents’ wedding reception. . . . Veuve Clicquot flowed like a river. . . . J.F.K. and Jackie canceled at the last minute.””

How relationships persevere, or fail – this topic is endlessly interesting to me. And there is an ongoing reflection on what makes a marriage work. Here’s one that resonated for me; “. . . fundamentally she didn’t like him. That’s a problem that can’t be fixed. Without simple affection, not sex but affection, a marriage can’t work.”

I kept meshing my image of the author Begley with the narrator, Philip – in fact he looks as I imagined Philip to look – see his image here. (http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/M...) After finishing the novel, I was intrigued to read that he was born in Poland and survived the Holocaust prior to moving to New York as a teenager and eventually becoming a successful lawyer. He is an outsider made good. One reviewer says “He has been compared with Louis Auchincloss, another lawyer-novelist who wrote about New York's upper classes. But Mr Begley is an outsider in this WASP milieu, and underneath his veneer of genteel civility is something I find hard to put my finger on: a mystery, an opaqueness, an anger, even, that makes his work very different.” This underlying emotion is subtle but may be what really draws me in as a reader. Or maybe this reviewer really nails the book; “In this, his eighth decade, he brings us face-to-face with perhaps his grittiest theme — the business of want. Of being on the outside, craving in.” I like that phrase, “the business of want.”

[E · Rating 2 out of 5]

What an odd little book about the difficulties of sifting through other people's impressions of events and people in a vain attempt to find the "truth" of a life, a friendship, a marriage, a point in time. About half way through its 188-page narrative, I was so tired of Lucy's diatribe about her divorced, dead husband Thomas (and her apparent masochism) that I almost put it down. (I felt as the narrator Phillip felt and reported about 50 pages later after hearing yet another version of the beleaguered marriage, "No, I wasn't sure I understood Thomas and Lucy better, and I wasn't sure that I cared. A great impatience had overcome me.") But around page 100, thank god, we start hearing more from other characters about Thomas and Lucy's marriage, histories, and personalities, filtered through Philip's Jamesean center of consciousness. I closed out the book feeling rather unsatisfied, which I suppose is part of the point (how can we ever tightly wrap up stories about those we know into one nice little package with a gaily colored ribbon?). But I felt that Begley had dropped the ball somewhat in not giving us a more in-depth picture of Lucy as a young girl (we are told several times that she was lovely and devil-may-care, but not shown). I would also like some insight into why she is a masochist - or at least presents herself as one.

A secondary dissatisfaction is the trajectory of story about Philip (his short but touching descriptions of his own marriage, his self-complacent detachment from others, yet self-labeled "obsession" with Lucy and Thomas's story). Philip's story plays around the edges of his narration, yet Begley keeps him at arm's length from the reader for reasons I can understand, yet not enjoy. Frankly, I'm much more interested in Philip and Bella's stories than in Lucy and Thomas's. With Philip, I couldn't help but be reminded of Henry James's Lambert Strether trying to understand the passions and secrets of the Europeans and expatriates whose lives and circumstances he swims through like muddy swamp water. Yet Strether learns and grows from his desire to understand story, even with all the ambiguity, lies, and ambivalence through which he must wade. I don't think that Philip does.

[Mythili · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why do marriages fail? When Philip, the aging protagonist of Louis Begley’s new novella, runs into Lucy de Bourgh at the New York Ballet, he is surprised by the gruff, bitter woman she has become. The old lady who startles him at intermission bears little resemblance to the vivacious, bold heiress and Radcliffe graduate he knew in the ‘50s. Lucy begins to tell Philip her life story, and though she is a tough critic of herself, the real villain in her account is her ex-husband Thomas, a successful banker born to working-class parents. The more she tells Philip, the more inquisitive he becomes. Was stable, square Thomas really the “monster” in their relationship? How much can Lucy’s explanation of events be trusted?

One by one, Phillip seeks out the moneyed old friends and acquaintances who knew Thomas and Lucy from their Cambridge and investment-banking days—his friend Alex van Buren, Thomas’s second wife Jane, another friend, Bill, and even Lucy and Thomas’s son Jamie—to cross-check her story. Initially, Philip’s obsession seems like the unrestrained curiosity of a lonely novelist still enamored with the upper-class chums of his college days. Later it resembles a character assassination led by a man and informed almost entirely by other men. Begley makes Lucy’s narration engrossing and seductive, but the version of events that Philip pieces together from his other sources is ruinous. (“She fucked up her life,” is how Bill puts it.) Memories of a Marriage is powerfully constructed, but Begley overplays his hand. Though Philip answers his questions about Lucy to his satisfaction, the reader is left with other questions—about the real the roots of Philip’s interest and the extent of his own biases. The flashes of self-awareness Philip experiences are too fleeting: “The finger pointed at the unreconstructed snob in me, who could not take his eyes off a damning piece of evidence: barely hatched, the self-made man had the temerity to marry an heiress.” Surely, an unreconstructed snob could misconstrue much more.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...

[Jan van Leent · Rating 4 out of 5]

In “Memories of a marriage” by Louis Begley, a writer – named Philip – in his seventies reconnects with an old friend – named Lucy – whom he met right out of college and hasn't seen for 40 years. Both main characters are from the East Coast privileged class: their capital acquired by their forefathers from one crime (slave-trade) or another. As parvenus their kind spend their life in luxury in places to be in Europe and at the East Coast.

Lucy once a beautiful woman with the world at her feet, has become a bitter divorce who fully puts the blame on her former husband Thomas. She has married Thomas – the son of a garage owner – after she has lost the opportunity for a good marriage with candidates from her own class after a few too many overtly sexual relations with Philip and many of his peers. Thomas became a very successful and well to do banker in Wall street, but he could never meet the parvenu's class culture in the opinion of Lucy (never wear black shoes before the evening).

Philip is now a widower – having lost his beloved wife to cancer – and one day he runs into Lucy who is now divorced from Thomas who had died several years before. Lucy starts telling her side of what had happened in her marriage: all very negative toward Thomas. Unable to believe Lucy’s side, that is besides his own memory and admiration of Thomas and Lucy, Philip begins an investigation as preparation for a novel by asking questions to Lucy – who gives intimate details of her marriage to Thomas – and by questioning others who have known Thomas and Lucy as a couple.

Very well written although a small part in the middle – used to speed up the storyline – is slightly out of tone. In case this small part would be fully elaborated in the same style and the plotting slightly improved, this book might deserve five stars.

[Doubleday Books · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meg Wolitzer of The New York Times Book Review said: "[E]ngrossing ... Begley gives us a chance to see into two different, often obscured worlds. One is the most private recesses of another couple’s marriage. The other is high-WASP society — though most people don’t usually even know where that particular unmarked door is, let alone get a chance to have it quietly shut in their faces ... The pleasures of this novel reside not so much in where the 'truth' lies as in its context. The world of the highly entitled at play and at work — seen traveling the globe over the decades, installing themselves in European hotels and joining exclusive men’s clubs and marrying into families made up of 'very much our kind of people' — remains irresistible."

[William Koon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louis Begley is a treasure. His prose sparkles and illuminates in an age of fluorescent flickerings. He does have a limited pallet, but then all great artists who know how to explore realize their territory and its terrors. Like J.P. Marquand and John Cheever, he confines another America and it’s possessions, i.e. Paris and London. His characters are the antithesis of hip. Here he explores a vain and preposterous character’s’ voyage through the hell of Anglo-French upper class life, sex, and its substitutes. Begley is always pithy and interesting. I think this is one of his finer works, although his ABOUT SCHMIDT is indeed a classic. The narration is first class.

[Emi Yoshida · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the title "Memories of a Marriage," I like how succinct and direct it is. But this book was anything but that. I found this self-satisfied narrator to be odiously petty, judgmental and scheming; and I pretty much felt sorry for the slandered victim whose faulty marriage he investigates.

Maybe if this story took place within Michigan's Tri-County area, I might have found these coincidental sightings and run-ins more believable, but to have them occurring all over Paris, London and New York City was just ridiculous. Mostly the narrator's ickiness ruined this book for me.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's just the kind of book that you can't put down. Set between Long Island, Manhattan and Sharon, CT it's easy to feel you've met all the characters before. You've been in their house and like the protagonist, you had no idea what was going on with their marriages. And it's set in the summer, so everything just seemed right.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sort of "Fifty Shades of Grey" meets "The Great Gatsby". Sexually aggressive aristocratic Rhode Island socialite marries the "townie" who uses her family connections and trust fund to elevate his status and career in investment banking. He becomes the self-made man and she flails uselessly in loneliness and self defeat.

[Lisa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Awful. The writing was one long run-on sentence after another, mixing speakers and tenses without warning. There was no plot. Being only 188 pages long is just about the only good thing I can say about it. Ugh.

[Heidi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had to kinda force myself to finish reading it - requested it at the library after seeing a review somewhere. Somewhat interesting tale of an unstable woman, formerly beautiful and charismatic, after her marriage unravels. Nothing new here....the writing just didn't grab me.

[Carol · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't love this book - I thought it was an interesting perspective of looking back on a failed marriage from another perspective but I found the main character sad and unexciting. Do not Recommend

[Karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not anywhere near as interesting as I expected it to be. I got tired of it about half way through. Finished it because it was short and I kept hoping it would become more meaningful or insightful if I continued, but it did neither. Probably won't read anything else by this author.

[bookreader · Rating 2 out of 5]

While "Wartime Lies" showed great promise, Begley seems oddly content these days to style himself a kind of outsider Auchincloss, prattling on about unreconstructed Northeast snobs who are of little literary interest, with even less merit.

[Bsldavio · Rating 1 out of 5]

***Fiction

[Geri Nesbitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is fascinating. It takes a little getting used to because you wonder why the main character is so very bitter. But, shortly you are really into it.

[Carolyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was ok, there was not much here other than two people's version of a divorce and one curious distant friend. Interesting to a degree, but kind of boring. I liked the settings, NY and RI.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

His mixture of wit and intelligence with earthy observations is reminiscent of Updike. If the world were fair he would be as widely read.

[Larry Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louis Begley is one of my favorite authors.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Memories of a Marriage, a novel by Louis Begley, is not the narrator’s memoir of his marriage to Bella, a wonderful French woman he lost too early to cancer, but the narrator’s reconstruction of another marriage, one between Lucy and Tom, that ended badly despite the fact that Lucy was an heiress with an ample trust fund and her status helped enable Tom to become a very influential, and very, very wealthy international banker. This in itself is notable because Tom had been from the wrong side of the tracks in Newport, Rhode Island. He was the son of a gas station operator and went to Harvard on a scholarship, so his success was nothing short of spectacular, ending up in a second marriage (after the divorce from Lucy) to a good-looking,intelligent, well-grounded woman named Jane.
In a sense this is a novel of manners--bad manners. Indeed, the narrator, Philip, is a novelist, one who has won prizes and survived financially without becoming truly famous or celebrated. He re-encounters Lucy when both are entering old age, and much of the story, at the beginning, entails her laying out for him how badly Tom treated her. Sex and alcohol, but mainly sex, are featured elements in her recollection. Tom, she says, was insatiable, and learned how to do things she rather liked. (What those things were isn’t quite clear but the topic comes up again and again.) But even so, she was gorgeous and had had a lot of lovers, and there was one Swiss journalist who really, really knew how to do things sexually, and as the narrative progresses, he keeps cropping up.
A certain clubbiness begins to inform the story. The Harvard gang, transplanted to New York, meets for lunch and dinner and reminisces and Philip becomes more intrigued. Did Tom beat Lucy? Did Tom mistreat her in other ways? Some of his old college classmates warn him not to take her too seriously. Over the decades, they’d all been to bed with her, Philip included, so watch out, there are always two sides to any marital story.
Philip eventually ferrets out confirmation that Tom awkwardly, abruptly but justifiably left Lucy one day (and left his teenage son), upon having learned with certainty that she was carrying on again with the Swiss Lothario. This isn’t entirely surprising, nor is it, novelistically speaking, entirely interesting. We already know that Lucy has been seeing a therapist for a long time, and we already know that she drinks too much and reminisces too frequently about sex...sex...sex.
The core mystery of her dysfunction isn’t fully explored as far as I can tell. By the same token, it’s not clear to me why the novel must so decidedly come down on Tom’s side (with corroborating testimony in the form of a letter from the now adult son Tom ‘abandoned.’) Two-sided marital disputes are always the case. My point isn’t otherwise. My point is that Philip and others, including Lucy and Tom, essentially agree it was a bad match to begin with. That being so, how much really was lost? Or, to put it another way, how much did either of them gamble in the first place?
The general backdrop of moneyed cosmopolitans having at it in Paris, New York, Long Island, Rhode Island, and Connecticut left me unimpressed. It isn’t overdrawn; in fact, there’s a restrained modesty evident in some of these clubs and finer restaurants and apartments with exceptional views. But still, it’s little wonder that the overlarge lives of the rich go off the track. With money comes luxurious complications.
My disappointment in this book is influenced to a certain extent by a few very significant encounters I had with Louis Begley in the 1990s. I was a diplomat in Germany who oversaw cultural programs, and Begley’s first novel, Wartime Lies, had just come out in German. That’s when I met him: he was in Bonn and then Frankfurt to promote it.
The backdrop to Wartime Lies and Begely’s own life is this: Louis Begley was born a Jew in Poland in the 1930s, and he was fortunate to get out. Not all of his relatives did. He has said he doesn’t see himself as a Holocaust writer, but that couldn’t really be the case during his visit to Germany. I hosted a lunch for him at my house in Bonn and one extremely significant exchange took place. A young, very successful German diplomat participated and to everyone’s shock, she said something that reflected a lack of awareness about the Holocaust. Begley could hardly beg her pardon for upsetting her, but neither he nor the rest of us, Germans and Americans, could believe how upset she became on hearing a few widely known facts. He asked if she wasn’t told these things in school. She said no and was in tears. Her generation would have been what is known as “the grandchildren.”
Begley was and remains a fine writer, but his case is so much more interesting than that. He took up fiction rather late in life, already having become a distinguished and successful international lawyer. By this I mean he was an extraordinarily sophisticated man of the world, based in both New York and Paris. Even so, how could he deal with or accept this German diplomat’s ignorance and distress? All he could do was shake his head. That’s all any of us could do.
The follow-up to this exchange took place a few days later in Frankfurt. Our America House director had worked with the Jewish community there to arrange a reading. I was responsible for the America Houses and took a great interest in promoting American literature. So I went down to Frankfurt for the night to hear Begley read from Wartime Lies and then answer questions. More “grandchildren” were present, lots of them, to their credit. Inevitably the subject of the Holocaust came up and what followed illustrated, to my mind, the centrality of literature in human experience. The occasion of Wartime Lies and the stories told within it caused one audience member to ask Begley how he felt about visiting Germany and what he took for his purpose. His answer was magnificent. He said he was a Jew, one who survived, and he thought it was critically important for him to come to Germany and let Germans look into his eyes as he looked into theirs, each aware of the history they shared. When he said that, the audience grew utterly quiet, Begley held everyone in his thrall, and a tremendous point was made, a moral point, a point that stories keep alive. All of us play a role in each other’s lives. What we do and what is done to us must be remembered, told and retold, and some day understood.
For more of my comments on contemporary writing, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).

[Histteach24 · Rating 3 out of 5]

You begin with a narrator who has suffered great loss yet explains it in a "life happens" kind of way. He accepts bachelorhood in the best way he can and decides to distract himself with the compelling mystery of the deterioration of an old friend's marriage. It is curiosity born of boredom, loneliness, and distraction. Truth be told, I'm not sure why the story is even that compelling. Divorce happens, it's often messy, and truthfully I have heard of worse. Is it the fact that the wife is of old money and status? The era of the divorce when such was taboo? It is a bit of 50 Shades with the heiress' sexual past-apparently wild and crazy bedroom affairs have been a thing for decades. I give credit to a female character who broke tradition, but she is not a reliable narrator. Hard to take sides as one party is deceased and you hear his story second and third hand.
A quick read, not has much of a "must read" as advertised.