Mistler's Exit [Hardcover]

Louis Begley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1998

Thomas Mistler has always thought himself "a happy man, as the world goes." A scion of old money, he made his own fortune in advertising and is now poised to sell the company he founded for a fabulous price. But when a medical examination reveals the presence in his liver of a fatal intruder, "preposterously, unmistakably, he begins to rejoice," with a feeling of having been set free. But free from what?

He will seek the answer surreptitiously, without revealing his illness to his family, during a last reprieve, a moment of grace in "the one place on earth where nothing irritates him." But amidst the surreal beauties of Venice, he finds bitterness and chaos as he allows himself to drift for the first time. His halfhearted efforts to seize the day and its present pleasures--first with a striving young photographer and later with a love of his youth who never loved him--cannot compete with his need to commune with the living and the dead that crowd his life: his father and uncle, pillars of the Establishment, sources of the "genetic puritanism" he has never tried to resist; his son, Sam, whose love he has only barely salvaged; his wife, once perfectly "beautiful and suitable," now humiliated by him and half-scorned. And the one woman who embodies everything he might have wished for, a woman he "never had and never lost."

Deeply poignant yet mordantly funny, Mistler's Exit brilliantly discloses the pleasures and miseries of having it all. A masterly revelation of the complexities of the heart.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Thomas Mistler is rich and distinguished, has a lovely, competent wife, and has more or less made it over the hump with his adult son. He is also dying. At the outset of Mistler's Exit, he is told by his doctor that the spot on his liver is indeed "the crab inside." Unexpectedly, Mistler greets this news with a kind of joy. Instead of wallowing in grief and the strange, protracted hope offered by medicine, he refuses all treatment, and is determined to accept his fate. But before he tells his family, Mistler decides to make a short escape to Venice. The "lingering taste of sweet," he hopes, will help him through the months ahead.

In Venice he wanders around like a man already dead, pondering his past and the few threads of future left to him: "It was the one place on earth where nothing bothered him.... His conscience need not nag if he failed to look at this or that essential painting or monument. Vedi Napoli e mori!. It wasn't as though you could capture a masterpiece on your retina and thereby turn it into a funerary object to accompany you, like a pharaoh, to the grave." There is also a last-ditch encounter with eros. A lovely young photographer, the consort of one of his society friends, has followed him to Venice, intent on an affair. This Mistler undertakes with detachment and annoyance, disliking what this young woman reveals to him.

As he did in his last novel, About Schmidt, Louis Begley presents us with a character who is not eminently likeable--who is, in fact, so insulated by privilege as to be almost distasteful. But slowly, subtly, the author elicits the reader's sympathy. For this we can thank the elegance and sobriety of his prose, along with its moments of true flight: "Preposterously, unmistakably, he began to rejoice. The horizon would no longer recede. The space and time left to him were defined; he had been set free." Mistler's Exit is a novel that is both intelligent and wise. --Emily Hall

From Publishers Weekly

There is perhaps no more worldly novelist writing today than Begley: worldly in his attention to class, wealth and sex, but most of all in his attention to pleasure in the face of death. So when his latest protagonist, Thomas Mistler, ruthless captain of a huge advertising firm, learns that he has cancer of the liver, he decides not to fight it and not to tell his wife or son about it immediately but, instead, to go to Venice, "the one place on earth where nothing irritated him," on a clandestine solo vacation. There he has?as Begley heroes do?a series of disquieting sexual adventures (in this case parodies of the erotic epiphany of Thomas Mann's Aschenbach), which bring home to us, if not to Mistler, his essential loneliness. In certain ways, this slim novel seems a pendant sketch to Begley's recent masterpiece, About Schmidt, another study of an aging, philandering gentleman's failures to connect. But this sketch presents enigmas of its own. Begley's dialogue, always highly starched, now sounds epistolary, as if carried on at a distance of miles and days. His hero's luxurious solipsism calls to mind not just Begley's constant great familiars (among them Mann, Jouve, Proust, James, Ford Madox Ford and Nabokov) but the random glamour of an Antonioni film, in which characters appear like emanations, free of the normal exigencies of plot. Even amid the palazzos and great churches of his vividly conjured Venice, Begley displays the bitter moral intelligence, the fear of emptiness, that has distinguished his late, extraordinary career from the start. Once again he has created a sinister, highly ambiguous protagonist in a haunting, ambivalent work of art. Author tour. Agent, Georges Borchardt.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 205 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (September 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375402624
• ISBN-13: 978-0375402623
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,898,413 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Begley Does it Again!, November 7, 1998

By 

Mary Moss ([e-mail]) (San Francisco, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mistler's Exit (Hardcover)

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!

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Life after the "final verdict", June 2, 2000

By 

C. A. Spencer (New Zealand) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mistler's Exit (Hardcover)

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!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Contemplating A Death in Venice., September 8, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Mistler's Exit (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

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