ANOTHER KIND OF DEATH IN VENICE, AND RECOLLECTIONS OF A LIFE

Author: By Gabriel Brownstein

Date: SUNDAY, August 30, 1998

Page: F2

Section: Books

In the seven years since ``Wartime Lies,'' he has published four novels, including his latest, ``Mistler's Exit.'' Begley has for the most part charted the lives of rich older men: their sexual desires, their fear of death and loss, and their wanderings, often through Europe. He's developed a reputation for his clean prose style, his dry wit, and his keen observations of the moneyed class -- a reputation that will be bolstered by ``Mistler's Exit.'' In this fine novel, Begley probes with intelligence and skill the mind and heart of a famous, fantastically wealthy New Yorker nearing the end of his life.

Considering his first novel and those that followed, it is as if Begley had asked in ``Wartime Lies,'' What's it like to have nothing in the world? And in the novels since, What's it like to have everything? The new novel delivers an odd answer: The one's not so different from the other.

Begley is always interested in loss. Here, he gives us Thomas Mistler, a wealthy, aristocratic executive, who, in the opening of the book, learns that he has a terminal case of liver cancer. Mistler decides to forgo treatment, keep his disease secret from his wife and son, and bolt to Venice to enjoy the last few healthy weeks of his life. The man who has everything, pursued by death, is hiding a dark secret and pretending to be other than he is -- he's acting strangely like Maciek, the boy-hero of ``Wartime Lies.'' But there's a crucial difference: If in ``Wartime Lies'' running, hiding, and pretending seemed urgently justified by events, in ``Mistler's Exit'' the actions are set at an odd, cool distance from the character's fate. There is no real point in Mistler's running or hiding. What you get here is no adventure story but rather a meditative study of blustery cowardice. Mistler, whatever life throws in his way, will curl up into the hard shell of his egotism. He bats about Venice; he recalls large stretches of his life; he seems strangely unfazed by everything.

The book begins in a doctor's office, with Mistler blase at the news he's receiving. ``I think I'll pass,'' he says when presented with the painful treatments that probably won't cure his cancer. His physician wants Mistler to consult his wife and son, but Begley's hero brushes the advice off. ``Let her have a couple of carefree weeks. There is nothing to participate in, after all, not right away.'' He doesn't shake his fist at heaven; there's no trembling of the knees. Mistler worries about the upcoming sale of his company. He goes alone to a party: ``The usual dinner, dressed-up fancy corpses pretending to be people I've known all my life. Disconcerting to realize they doubtless had the same impression of me.'' A more conventional novel would treat this cold fish ironically, mock him, or at least make him learn something profound. But Begley doesn't condescend to Mistler; instead, he makes you see the world through the man's cold, grim eyes. This guy doesn't get in touch with his feelings; he doesn't even get in touch with his wife.

Mistler goes to Venice, and waiting for him there is Lina, a beautiful young photographer who seduces him, probably so she can get a job with his advertising agency. She wants to shoot his portrait; Mistler suggests they go to a cemetery and imagines ``an elegant sepia-toned pamphlet, Death in Venice: A Picture Essay, with a brief introduction by Thomas Hooker Mistler III . . . Close-ups of his face, shots that showed him cavorting among the graves, would alternate with material on how, all the while, his liver was going down the drain.'' He and Lina have a desultory affair. Mistler decides that, ``Sex before death excited him about as much as a business lunch. He would rather have a tuna sandwich in his office.'' She leaves him with a note that ends, ``P.S., I don't think you like women. I'm not even sure you like men. So what's with you?'' And a couple of paragraphs after she's gone, Mistler is on the phone to New York, talking about stock swapping and the sale of his company. The affair, like everything else, leaves him unmoved.

What's heartbreaking is that Mistler is aware of his condition. ``The trouble,'' he admits to Lina, ``is that even special moments . . . don't make me cheerful. They just linger there -- at a distance.'' He imagines a letter to his son, a confession in which he talks about the times, ``when you were a baby and then a little boy, before you were hurt. Hurt by me.'' But he never sends those words, he simply meditates on them. After Lina dumps him, the novel meanders a bit. Mistler encounters Bella, an old college crush, a woman who, in a moment right out of Philip Roth, shows him her breasts the first night they meet. (``Big aren't they?'' she says. ``Like ripe melons.'') Mistler woos her extravagantly, with flowers and overpriced gifts. They sleep together once; that's all; it's no transcendent moment. Mistler's high hopes get blown like dandelion seeds across a field.

At the end, Mistler is as aloof from the world as he was at the beginning. The result is a cool character study, an uncompromising novel spare of lush pleasures and grand revelations. Read it for Begley's wit dry as paper, for his cold and careful eye. It's a strangely static work, and that's another crucial difference between ``Mistler's Exit'' and ``Wartime Lies'': Maciek is rescued from the Holocaust, but Mistler has no chance to be rescued from himself.