Louis Begley is perhaps currently best known as the author of About Schmidt, the novel from which the recent acclaimed film starring Jack Nicholson was adapted. This is a somewhat misleading introduction to the novelist and his work: For starters, the film departed from the novel in placing its eponymous protagonist among the middle classes of the American Midwest, rather than in the rarefied air of Long Island's Hamptons. Moreover, Schmidt--in spite of his moneyed society and his irascible, fastidious nature--is not wholly typical of Begley's characters: As the author has said, "Schmidt is different from my other protagonists. I would say that he is more ordinary. I know a number of men like him."

John North, at the center of Begley's new novel, Shipwreck, is a more representative Begley creation. He is far from ordinary, an unlikely and not wholly likable man whose accomplishments, as much as his breeding and prosperity, set him apart from the pack. The tale that he has to tell is more lurid, and more novelistic, than Schmidt's poignant, faintly mundane familial troubles; but this is perhaps not surprising, given that North is a celebrated novelist.

Curiously, however, North is a novelist to whom Begley does not grant full control of his narrative. North tells his story through the intermediary of an unnamed narrator/confessor he encounters in a bar called L'Entre Deux Mondes. Quite why North settles upon this listener, why this listener so avidly endures the account over a matter of days, or why this listener then relays the account to us, is never made clear: All the questions such a structure inevitably raises--to do with the nature and needs of our primary interlocutor--are here unanswered. He is the ultimate voyeur, all-seeing and unseen, unrevealed to the point that he comes, eventually, to irk North himself--though never sufficiently to interrupt the inexorable flow of North's tale.

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