COMEDY OF BAD MANNERS

By R.Z. Sheppard

Early retired and recently widowed, Albert Schmidt is at a lonely but attractive crossroads, contemplating his fate somewhere in Bridgehampton, Long Island, a summer sporting grounds for New York City's diverse meritocracy. Schmidt's own credentials are hard-earned: a sheepskin from Harvard and a partnership at a leading Manhattan law firm. He also belongs to a high caste: the Wasp establishment that first built the shingled 14-room "cottages" and exclusive country clubs of the Hamptons.

Louis Begley's About Schmidt (Knopf; 274 pages; $23) peels back a layer or two of this weekend world, where the old gentry and gregarious newcomers have little in common except tax brackets. Begley is himself a New York City lawyer turned writer who has fictionalized delicate matters of class and ethnicity before. For instance, his earlier novel The Man Who Was Late (1992) is about a New York City lawyer who, as a Jew, always feels somewhat on the outside in his white-shoe firm.

Schmidt, on the other hand, knows his position: a 60-year-old retiree who must face changing circumstances. Unplugged from a regular and generous income, he must cope with a reduced cash flow by giving up his Fifth Avenue apartment to live full time in Bridgehampton. He must also cope with his daughter Charlotte, a public relations executive who dissembles for tobacco companies and is engaged to Jon Riker, Schmidt's former protege at the firm of Wood & King.

Schmidt loves his daughter and admires his future son-in-law, but he likes neither. He sees Charlotte as "a smug overworked yuppie" and Riker as an uncultured legal drone. Riker is also a Jew, which puts Schmidt in the awkward position of being branded a bigot because he does not enthusiastically welcome him into his family. To complicate the issue, Schmidt must vigorously fend off Riker's mother, an overzealous psychiatrist who treats him as if he were a repressed Wasp. What she does not know is that Schmidt is having a hell of a good time in bed with the 20-year-old Hispanic waitress who also serves him his regular chopped steak.

Elements of social satire outweigh any serious intent Begley might have to air the subject of genteel anti-Semitism. Schmidt, like most people, has an active Them-and-Us reflex, and his real biases are generational. He grouses dolefully about the slide in professional standards, the decline of civility and the thoughtlessness of youth. In what could be called a novel of bad manners, Begley again demonstrates that he can reveal the complexities of society and personality with a clear eye and graceful style. Schmidt may not live up to today's strict standards of political correctness, but he more than meets the requirements of convincing fiction.

--By R.Z. Sheppard