Volume 45, Number 17 · November 5, 1998
Pricks and Kicks
By Gabriele Annan
Mistler's Exit
by Louis Begley
Knopf, 206 pp., $22.00
Europa
by Tim Parks
Arcade, 262 pp., $23.95
The novels by Louis Begley and Tim Parks, one American, the other English, present a violent contrast in tempo, temperament, and tone, and yet they have a lot in common. The half-hidden theme in both is free will: or rather its absence, which both heroes come to recognize and furiously resent. Both are highly cultivated, well-read, self-aware WASP males exercising their considerable sensibilities in Europe. Parks's Jerry is a middle-class English academic; Begley's Mistler an upper-crust New Yorker. Jerry is the first-person narrator in Europa, whereas Mistler's Exit is written in the third person. It makes very little difference: everything that happens in Louis Begley's novel is seen, felt, and judged by Mistler: he is just as much the 'I' as Jerry is. Besides, Begley's minor characters are definitely minor and more schematic than Parks's.
Review, 3241 words
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