worshipful Lea Moroni an interesting change of pace.
"I felt squeamish about welcoming Lydia to the bed that was the arena of my nightly exertions with Lea," North says once Lydia returns. "Squeamish," "welcoming," "arena" and "exertions" are very powerful words in that sentence, and Begley deploys them with deliberate attention to North's limitations.
But the character becomes even more off-putting than perhaps he is meant to, if only because he is so slow to see where Lea is leading him. "Her craziness was the ugly side of the high intelligence and eerie sensitivity that made her able to see through me at a glance," North observes, at a point when this realization is long overdue.
In Shipwreck, Begley displays his perverse gift for riveting attention despite the unsympathetic, unyielding nature of the man he describes. Although there is an essential banality to the story he tells here, the reader is apt to be hooked. This has less to do with how the novel's plot will play out ("Such an energetic young person! She seems very fond of you," says Lydia, finally encountering Lea in the latter's Fatal Attraction mode) than with the book's piercing view of literary life.
Professional jealousy, self-doubt, angling for prizes, being used as a conversation piece at dinner parties: Begley writes most knowingly about matters like these. Thus North constructs his latest book, Loss, which is a lot like this one: "It would be a rather short novel in an age when it seemed that proof of serious purpose and rich imagination was to write a work of 800 pages without a plot and without a single memorable character. But my method of composition has always been to write down all that I have to say on a given subject and stop. To strain for more is like adding Hamburger Helper."
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