About Schmidt: A Novel (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

by Louis Begley (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  1997

  $20.90

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.53

  Albert Schmidt is a retired lawyer who misses his recently deceased wife, has an unhealthy diet, is a mild anti-Semite and owns a nice home in the Hamptons he feels compelled to offer to his daughter as a wedding present. Said daughter, Charlotte, is a yuppie in all the worst ways. She handles public relations for tobacco companies, doesn't want the house in the Hamptons, and is about to marry a buttoned-up Jewish lawyer. Schmidt, who had built a very lucrative career on his ability to be 'always demonstrably and impeccably right', begins to feel the first stirrings of self-doubt and, to his own astonishment, finds himself beginning an affair with a frank, exuberant waitress, a woman younger than his daughter. The conflict takes off from there in this finely told tale of retirement, inheritance, sex and death.