Customer Reviews

Mistler's Exit (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Once again Louis Begley has written a beautiful, elegant and spare novel that has not one extraneous or superfluous word in it. Though a slim volume, it is dense with stunning sentences, and themes. They are like jewels, to be read and savored over and over again as were each of his previous books. I love this guy!

After reading "All about Schmidt" I was attracted to read another book by Louis Begley. This has to be a recommendation of the author. He must be doing something right to qualify for more hours of my discretionary time. Perhaps I was attracted by his grammatical English, which is sadly becoming rarer with an almost universal expectation of little more than bare communication on the lowest level. His legal background is evident in a few periodic sentences of tedious length. There are few and they give way to a simple and wonderfully direct prose for human reaction and emotion. If you were given a finite life expectancy, how would you react? This is the stuff of TV human interest programs. What does our legally trained author offer beyond the banal? Firstly, this is a truly positive book. Nothing morbid here. It is a litany of human passion, self-indulgence and self-gratification. And why not, if you have only a few months to live. The message is Horace's old maxim "carpe diem." Live life. Don't wait. Our hero, Thomas Mistler, in fact had to wait till he had a terminal report from his doctor. But his unexpected reaction is one of freedom from what had restricted his inner-most emotions before knowing that life was not to continue in its bourgeois continuum apparently foreever. So the reader is part of his late emotional and sexual emancipation. He enjoys what many secretly dream of without the burden of middle class values and narrow religious scruple.

Don't read this if you are concerned with the thoughts of an older man who is still sexually alive and well. Don't read it if you are bound by the rules of middle class restrictions of the "apropriate," whatever that may be.

This should be compulsory reading for those with a serious, or life-threatening condition. Forget the gloom. Just for once, let your real feelings come to the fore.

Not to forget Louis Begley's wonderfully succinct and irnonic style, let me assure you that this is a book for those who appreciate irony and grit. Older readers might even find it educational!

Thomas Mistler, the founder and CEO of a world-renowned, New York advertising agency, is not a very likable person. A self-indulgent WASP who enjoys the high life, he is accustomed to getting his own way both in business and in his personal life. Married to an "appropriate," pedigreed wife, with whom he has an appropropriate, conventional home life, he also pursues other women attracted to his "glitz." Suddenly, Mistler discovers that he has liver cancer, too far advanced to make treatment a viable option without interfering with the quality of his remaining days.

With remarkable sang-froid, Mistler decides not to tell his family, feigning a business trip to Europe so that he can have a week by himself in Venice to prepare for the inevitable. To his surprise, he discovers a young woman in his hotel room, a photographer he has just met at a dinner party who is attracted to him but also wants to work for his agency. With Lena he revisits many of his favorite places, and indulges in sensual pleasures, fine wines, and foods before his insensitivity drives her away.

Alone, Mistler explores his past and contemplates his relationships with his father, his father's mistress (Tante Elizabeth, whom he adores), his wife and son (who has escaped to the West Coast to become a writer), friends from school, and ultimately, "the girl who got away," a Radcliffe classmate when he was at Harvard, who is now living in Venice. Unsentimental, Mistler makes no excuses for what he gradually begins to see as his faults. While he knows he will not change, at this point, he also knows, as an advertising man, that he has the power to affect how he himself may be viewed in the future if he acts appropriately now.

The Venice setting is perfect for this book about a man contemplating death. The canals are polluted and devoid of life, and the city itself survives only through an enormous effort to hold back the sea. Resembling Hades and its series of rivers, Venice also features gondoliers in black boats who resemble Charon, the old man who ferries the dead across the River Styx to Hades, and when Mistler buys a black wherry from a boatman, all the imagery comes together. Though the main character may not be someone with whom the reader will identify, his behavior and actions are consistent with his personality. Author Begley conveys Mistler's formality and his inner feelings in elegant language, completely appropriate for Mistler, and his insights into life's big questions are thoughtful. Mary Whipple

Thomas Mistler, a very successful (but not especially ethical) CEO, learns he has terminal cancer. To cope, he takes a solitary trip to Venice, where his goal is to explore his past and to adjust to his six-months-to-live medical status.

On the plus side, Begley shows how Mistler uses the art and locale of Venice, as well as the people he meets, to come to terms with his life and familial regrets, as well as the world of achievements and missed opportunities he will leave behind. From this perspective, the book describes an intriguing, albeit depressing, vacation. This is the story of a man tying together loose ends.

On the other hand, I read this book as a comment ONLY on the life of Thomas Mistler who, to use Tom Wolfe's term, is a master of the universe. For me, its revelations and resolutions made sense for Mistler. But universality is absent.

A good book for Louis Begley fans.

what would you do? Mistler's decision is interesting: He goes to Venice. He appreciates the knowledge that he is to die because it defines the horizon of his life. This horizon is no longer receding before him. Things are set, fixed now, for eternity. He knows what is going to happen, and he knows exactly what he wants to do. And Mistler is a man who believes in remaining in control, even when that control has apparently been removed.

Begley is the master of the portrayal of the east coast establishment culture of wealth and privilege, and Mistler is an unapologetic member of this tribe. He is hard to like, but difficult to ignore. Mistler may be deceiving himself, but his self-deception is a mixture of wariness, craftiness, and an almost touching transparency, especially when he is together with an old school flame. And the writing, as it always is with Louis Begley, is superb.

EKW

There is a kind of sameness to Louis Begley's protagonists. I read the Schmidt books a few years back, and while I enjoyed the stories and appreciated the craft inherent in their telling, I couldn't bring myself to really like Schmidt. The same is true of Thomas Mistler. An ultra-successful businessman in the ad game, he comes across as rather cold and ruthless in his personal life. He is mostly about being in control, and remains this way even about his dying. He will choreograph and direct his death and whatever time he has left insofar as it is possible. Begley is obviously trying to draw parallels to Mann's Death in Venice, but it doesn't quite succeed. The images are clear and stark, however, right down to the shining black vessel he purchases from a boatman in Venice, a wherry - "Squat, and shiny black like a long coffin ..."
As he did in the Schmidt books, Begley writes with knowledge and ease about the world of business, tax advantages, and legal loopholes regarding transfers of wealth; but he is equally at ease in talking of art, literature and music. An interesting and rare talent. If you enjoyed About Schmidt and Schmidt Delivered, you will probably also like Mistler's Exit. - Tim Bazzett, author of the ReedCityBoy trilogy ([...])

I enjoy reading Louis Begley, but I do get a bit tired of his all conquering male sex gods. Why do women fall for these over-the-hill guys? Don't know.

The writing is excellent and insightful, however, so well worth reading. If only I understood the last sentence I might know if Mistler's Exit was to be a good one or not.

Exquisite novel featuring an older American businessman, quite successful, an ad man actually, who receives a diagnosis of terminal cancer and repairs to Venice solo leaving behind (and uninformed) his wife and son. On my list of Best Books Read This Year.

I was extremely disappointed by this work. I had high expectations after reading a review in a newspaper. The book's appearance is beautiful, but the content is simplistic, with under developed one-dimensional characters. The storyline sounded complex and probing but the story had no depth and simply skimmed with highlights on this and that. The details that were provided were inconsequential and did nothing to develop the characters or make the story more interesting. The only reason I almost finished it was I kept on thinking "It has to get better...The writing will change and something interesting will happen."

Do not buy this book. You can have mine.