Self-awareness reflected in a chilly mirror

Like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Louis Begley’s seventh novel, “Shipwreck,” is the story of a personal moral disaster compellingly and compulsively told to an innocent, uninvolved bystander by the person who caused, endured and survived it.

John North is a respectably successful writer: His novels are esteemed by critics, they have been translated into foreign languages, and he has even won a prestigious prize for a recent book, which is also being made into a movie by a competent and cooperative film director.

For years, he has been happily married to a truly wonderful woman, Lydia, a distinguished physician and one of the most thoughtful, caring, considerate and devoted wives any man, let alone a writer, could wish for. She is his first reader and best critic. As if all this were not enough, Lydia’s family is incredibly rich, kind and admirable in every way, so much so that North sometimes finds himself mildly envying and resenting it.

But he has never resented Lydia, whom he considers the most intelligent woman in New York. Nor did he ever find himself bored by her. Nor did he ever cheat on her -- at least not until he met a young French journalist and painter named Lea Morini, who was assigned to interview him in Paris for the French edition of Vogue.

It’s not quite clear to North, even as he tells the story, what it was that made him susceptible to Lea’s charms. From his account of the physical attraction he initially felt for her as she sat on the floor in her miniskirt, curled at his feet, it would seem to have been a case of simple, old-fashioned lust. But why would an otherwise contented and adoring husband succumb to such an impulse?

A possible clue is provided when North confesses that shortly before meeting Lea, he had been suffering from doubts about the value of his work. One evening, while his wife was away at a medical conference, he sat down and started to reread all his published novels:

“At a certain point,” he explains, “entire sentences I had written seemed to disintegrate like figures in a kaleidoscope when you turn the tube, only my words did not regroup and coalesce as new wonders of color and design. They lay on the page like so many vulgar, odious pieces of shattered glass. The conclusion I reached came down to this: none of my books, neither the new novel nor any I had written before, was very good. Certainly, none possessed the literary merit that critical opinion ascribed to them.”

Did these doubts engender a reckless and self-punishing state of mind, which, in turn, inclined him to a course of behavior likely to result in the wreck of his marriage and his life? Perhaps. Yet throughout the many stages of this graphically described sexual affair, North still exercises an impressive, even chilling, degree of self-control and caution. Excited as he is by Lea’s lubricity, he remains firmly determined to protect his marriage by making sure his wife won’t find out what’s been going on. He has no desire to leave her or to replace her with his younger mistress. He fully expects and hopes that the affair will end in due course. Indeed, after a while he finds that, apart from the sex, Lea bores him. Yet as he nonetheless discovers, things have a way of getting out of hand.

At one stage in the narrative where he is describing his literary career, North characterizes himself as a novelist who doesn’t go in for a lot of extraneous description, developments or subplots: “... my method of composition has always been to write down all I have to say on a given subject and stop.” The same might be (and indeed has been) said of Begley: He is a novelist who doesn’t mince words and writes very much to the point. Yet he is also able to convey a moment-by-moment sense of what his characters are thinking, feeling and experiencing.

This vivid sense of detail is evident in the novel’s sex scenes, which are coolly explicit. Although we live in a culture inundated by sex and sexual innuendo, explicit sex scenes, contrary to the conventional wisdom, are not as prevalent in today’s literary novels as they were in novels of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s. So in this respect, at least, it is probably more fitting to congratulate Begley for bucking a trend than to criticize him for conforming to a nonexistent demand for “obligatory sex scenes.”

Begley also reveals North’s character, his capacity for self-knowledge (and for self-deception), by portraying his thoughts, his changing moods and his rationalizations with the same eye for significant detail.

“My growing determination to shun further contact with Lea,” North reflects at one point, “is really of a piece with how I often behave in much more trivial matters, when I have been disappointed or when I think I have been in the wrong.” North’s account of how he reacts when served a bad meal at a favorite restaurant or given a bad haircut by a barber he’s trusted is a perfect miniature that sums up a great deal about his character.

North, like other of Begley’s protagonists, is a chilly character whose ability to scrutinize and dissect himself renders him strangely fascinating. His obsessive self-awareness, like a mirror, catches our attention and holds it fast.