Schmidt (novel)

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Schmidt (English original title: About Schmidt ) is a novel by the American writer Louis Begley . It was published in 1996 by the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf . The German translation by Christa Krüger was published by Suhrkamp Verlag the following year. The novel about retired attorney Albert Schmidt became Begley's most popular work. In 2002, it served as a template for the film adaptation of the same name by Alexander Payne with Jack Nicholson in the lead role. Two sequels appeared in 2000 ( Schmidt Delivered , German: Schmidt's Probation ) and 2012 ( Schmidt Steps Back , German: Schmidts Einsicht ).

content

Albert Schmidt, called Schmidtie, experiences a deep turning point in his life at the age of 60. His wife Mary dies of cancer after a short, serious illness. At the end of a stagnant career as a commercial lawyer, he feels himself being pushed into retirement by the partners of the renowned New York law firm Wood & King. Ironically, a young partner in the firm, the ambitious Jon Riker, wants to marry his only daughter Charlotte, who has been estranged from her father for some time. Although he does not see himself as an anti-Semite , Schmidt is particularly outraged that his designated son-in-law is Jewish and that his daughter is toying with the idea of converting to the Mosaic faith .

Schmidt lives in a large house in the Hamptons , but only has the usufruct because his wife has bequeathed it to his daughter. In order to free himself from this dependency, he plans to forego the usufruct for their wedding, a gift that brings nothing but financial burdens to all parties because the young couple has to pay inheritance tax and Schmidt is threatened with pension cuts. However, it is typical of his stiff and formal, but rarely warm, manners. When dealing with his daughter's future in-laws, the psychiatrist couple Renata and Myron Riker, Schmidt strives for impeccable behavior, which, however, shakes Renata when she not only dissects his mental life professionally, but also arouses his sexual desire.

In Schmidt's marriage, sexuality had long since ceased to play a role, and he frequently cheated on his wife, with only the brief, passionate affair with the French au pair girl Corinne remaining in his memory. In contrast to the countless acquaintances of his late wife, Schmidt remained only one friend from his student days: the film director Gil Blackman. Schmidt envies his friend for his double life between his wife and young lover, until one day she leaves him and the friend falls into a deep crisis. Schmidt, on the other hand, meets the waitress Caridad Gorchuk, known as "Carrie", in his regular café. He does not understand what draws the Puerto Rican, who is younger than his own daughter, to him, but an affair develops between the unequal partners. Finally Carrie moves in with Schmidt, half tolerated by her friend Bryan.

With Carrie, an old homeless man also enters Schmidt's life, who follows him like a rock and turns out to be Carrie's first lover, her former chemistry teacher Wilson. Drunk after a party, Schmidt runs over his pursuer in his driveway and sustains serious injuries. He hires Bryan to bring him back to health. With his daughter, however, there is a falling out when she learns that Carrie is sleeping in her mother's previous bed. Depleted by the past turbulence, Schmidt resolves not to make any more plans for his future. Then he learns that his father's second wife, who once disinherited him, left him his considerable fortune because he once sent her a friendly Christmas card at Mary's insistence. Already he can hardly wait for his convalescence and is planning the administration of the estate.

interpretation

Albert Schmidt, the title character of the novel, is for Ulrich Greiner a typical representative of "the white middle and upper class" on the American east coast . It is a class that defines itself “through ownership and career” and not least through “the connection between money and feeling”. Phyllis Rose puts him in the WASP class , the "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant", and his daughter Charlotte in that of the yuppies . Schmidt's good righteousness meets the dry temperament of secular Judaism , which gives the whole novel a controlled, hypothermic mood, which is also reflected in the precise, economic language that forbids any emotional upsurge, reminiscent of a well thought-out business contract.

Two American reviews highlight his bigotry as Schmidt's outstanding characteristic . Rose considers him to be everyone with everyone's problems, while Thomas Hines allows him to win over the reader even though his sins are open to him. Greiner describes Schmidt as "lewd, self-righteous, know-it-all" and distrusts him when he talks about love. The reader vacillates between disgust and sympathy. According to Hines, Schmidt always focused his life on tact and manners. It is exclusive in a double sense of the word, also exclusive in excluding other ways of life. Schmidt considers his glowing anti-Semitism to be “harmless”, almost “irrelevant,” which Begley commented: “Of course, Schmidt's anti-Semitism is not of the kind that smashes in shop windows.” Rather, he wanted to point out a form of “social sclerosis ”, one Person remains biased in their prejudices and behaviors.

According to Rose, Louis Begley always describes a world that is in a state of flux in the Heraclitic sense and whose changes one must come to terms with. For Schmidt, too, according to Hines, it is as if he had raised his head for the first time in years at his desk to look around, and he was unable to cope with the unexpected change in the world. Ursula Keller characterizes Begley as a relentless chronicler of "self-deception and lies." So an abyss suddenly opened up in front of the lawyer who is used to success, a loneliness as a result of one's own lifestyle. The ambition and the cold feeling that he despises in his son-in-law actually point back to Schmidt himself. According to Greiner, Schmidt lives a life in which he shields himself from internal (“doubt, melancholy, depression”) and external enemies. But what he lacks is the meaning of life . Especially in the complete concentration on the here and now of the characters (even Charlotte, for example, only looks for tradition in secular Judaism, but not faith), the hereafter becomes all the more threatening. But instead of God there is only money. Begley proves in the novel as "a master of the philosophical novel in the mimicry of casual chat".

Schmidt has a fundamentally pessimistic worldview: all things end badly, and if a couple is happy together, it is only because their time has not yet come. Schmidt also expects his own love affair with the young Carrie to end badly, and he would even accept such an end as a just punishment from fate for his undeserved late happiness. According to Victoria N. Alexander, the novel then interprets the trail of a bad ending. The homeless person chasing Schmidt is compared to the “stone guest” of the Don Juan myth, and when another friend of Carries lodges with Schmidt, he seems to be helplessly trapped. But Begley breaks with all expectations and gives his hero a happy ending against all odds, which not only gives him an unexpected inheritance, but also clears both rivals from the world or at least from the city. In this break with the expected order, Alexander Begley's image of an irrational world becomes visible. The novel is also a revision of the earlier novel The Man Who Was Late (1993, German: The man who came too late ), with whose protagonist Ben Schmidt shares many character traits. It is Schmidt's friend Gil who expresses the quintessence that it is never too late in life.

reception

About Schmidt is Louis Begley's most popular novel and is considered to be particularly cheerful and relaxed in his work. Thomas R. Edwards, for example, judged in the New York Review of Books that the book was characterized by "a relaxed, friendly wisdom which, after the social and intellectual extravagance of his two earlier novels, appears particularly unexpected and impressive". The strong reference to America was positively received by American reviewers, after Europe had been "the source of all acceptable culture as well as all terrible historical and personal tragedies" in earlier novels. In the reviews of the later novels, too, reference was repeatedly made to About Schmidt and Begley was identified as “ Schmidt's author ”.

Contributed to the fame of the novel has - in addition to the later film adaptation - a random coincidence: The police found a copy of the novel on the nightstand a hotel room in Miami Beach , the Andrew Cunanan , the murderer of fashion designer Gianni Versace , inhabited. About the ensuing interest of the American public in the author of the book, Begley wrote the gloss The Killer Who Read Me (German: The murderer, my reader ), which appeared in the New Yorker in August 1997 . In it he mocked the incredulous surprise of the media "that a suspected serial killer kills the time between his murders with a novel and that I don't find anything unnatural about this activity". He even drew a direct comparison between authors and murderers: "Fantasies: we write them down, he acts them out."

Adaptations

In 2002, the movie was About Schmidt of Alexander Payne in theaters. For the title role, Jack Nicholson received a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar . However, the film has only a loose reference to Begley's original. Payne only slightly adapted a script he had already written to the novel. Even the first name of the film character does not match. "Warren" Schmidt does not come from the wealthy upper class, has no lovers and does not reveal himself to be an anti-Semite. Begley had no influence on the work on the film, but sat in his simultaneously incurred Roman Shipwreck ( Shipwreck of literature) with the basic problems apart. He called Payne's result a “gem of original film work”. Despite all the deviations, he found the core of his novel unchanged, and the central themes were "treated with great intelligence and sensitivity".

Both Mario Adorf and Klaus Jepsen read the novel as an audio book.

expenditure

  • Louis Begley: About Schmidt . Alfred Knopf, New York 1996, ISBN 0-679-45033-5 .
  • Louis Begley: Schmidt . Translated from the English by Christa Krüger. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-518-40918-2 .

literature

  • Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 86-99.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Ulrich Greiner: Schmidt or Das totale Diesseits . In: Die Zeit of August 22, 1997.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Phyllis Rose: An Ordinary Bigot . In: The New York Times, September 22, 1996.
  3. ^ A b c Thomas Hines: A Well-Behaved Bigot . In: Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1996.
  4. ^ "Of course, Schmidt's anti-semitism isn't the shop-smashing sort", "a kind of social sclerosis". Quoted from: Paul Reidinger: Beyond the Courtroom Thriller: The story of two lawyers who write serious fiction - and get away with it . In: ABA Journal , Vol. 83, No. 3 (March 1997), pp. 56-59, here: p. 58.
  5. ↑ Ursula Keller: Poor, rich Schmidt . In: Der Spiegel from December 8, 1997.
  6. ↑ Victoria N. Alexander: Louis Begley: Trying to Make Sense of It . In: The Antioch Review Vol. 55, No. 3, (Sommer 1997), pp. 292-304, here pp. 302-304.
  7. ^ Thomas R. Edwards: Palm Beach Story . In: The New York Review of Books of October 31, 1996. Quoted from: Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , p. 95.
  8. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 95, 98.
  9. ↑ Louis Begley: The Killer Who Read Me . In: The New Yorker, August 4, 1997, p. 24.
  10. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 95-96.
  11. ↑ Christa Krüger: Louis Begley. Life work effect . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-518-18236-9 , pp. 96-97.
  12. ↑ “gem of original filmmaking”, “my most important themes were treated with great intelligence and sensitivity”. Quoted from: Louis Begley: My Novel, the Movie: My Baby Reborn; 'About Schmidt' Was Changed, But Not Its Core . In: The New York Times, January 19, 2003.