Louis Begley's perceptive novel hums with emotional energy and shimmers with haunting images. A National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist, About Schmidt is a powerful meditation on loneliness, desire, and transformation. Old-school lawyer Albert Schmidt has spent years carefully climbing the ladder of success. But now, at what should be the pinnacle of his career, his life is in chaos. Within months, he is widowed and forcibly retired from his firm. He harbors painfully mixed feelings about his ambitious daughter's impending marriage. Suddenly, in the midst of this turmoil, a seductive young woman asks Smitty what he wants. Far from being a time of satisfaction and complacency, the middle age encountered by Begley's hero is the beginning of a new journey tantalizing, yet unnerving. From the first step, Begley draws the reader deeply into a man's quest for new ways to understand an unstable world.