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Product Description
From Amazon
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
Addictive...Strange,
By Michael Hong Chee Wah (Singapore) - See all my reviews
This review is from: About Schmidt (Paperback)
I picked up this book because I was so struck off by the Mothman Prophecies which in my opinion was hardly worth the time. Anyway...The initial pages of this novel was hard to comprehend. Perhaps it was the fabulous literary descriptions or his fascination with the financial transactions(or was it the lack of quotation marks and my utter lack of focus sometimes?) which made it difficult to enjoy the first 50 pages of the book. But after reading more and getting acquinted with the character Shmidt, I was hooked. He seemed generally sincere if not a little reclusive. Maybe it was the times he was brought up in, maybe it was the lack of his parent's affections(as he so tried to avoid his mother's incessant disregard for this privacy, that would make anyone cuckoo too). His need for propreity and his sandwhiched alternation between visiting the diner and his palatial mansion is a treat. Fantastic stuff. Why am I so darn protective of him? Cause I think he is so much like me. I read with disbelief...
4.0 out of 5 stars
An attaching character, but the story has flaws,
By Kirk McElhearn "Freelance writer and translator" (A town in the French Alps) - See all my reviews
This review is from: About Schmidt (Paperback)
Schmidt is a grouchy old man, retired from his law practice, living in an expensive house on Long Island. He's an attaching character, and the story is interesting and compelling, but finally it is flawed. Schmidt is almost too cut and dried, and the plot is too simplistic - as he comes to terms with his daughter's impending marriage, he meets and falls in love with a twenty-something waitress. But above all, the story ends abruptly, as if the author didn't want to finish it, and rather make another book out of it. I'll probably read the sequel, but with some trepidation.
4.0 out of 5 stars
it is the book that has the Hollywood ending!,
By
This review is from: About Schmidt (Paperback)
The differences between the book and the movie are remarkable as other reviewers have noted but if you liked the movie that makes the book all the more interesting.The book is set in the Hamptons and New York. The protagonist, Schmidt, is a 60-year-old WASP lawyer who retires from his law firm partnership when his wife becomes terminally ill. The wife is from an old rich WASP family and works as a literary fiction editor. Schmidt's daughter, a Harvard-educated yuppie who does PR for a tobacco company, is planning to marry a junior partner at Schmidt's old firm. This horrifies Schmidt partly because his future son-in-law doesn't read books or appreciate culture but mostly because the young lawyer is Jewish. Much of the book centers on Schmidt's horror at a formerly genteel world of New York law firms and Long Island beaches, now despoiled by an influx of Jews. The last half of the book is devoted to a romance between Schmidt and a 20-year-old half-Puerto Rican waitress, complete with a Hollywood happy ending. The screenplay transplants the action to Omaha, Nebraska. Schmidt and his wife are middle class salt-of-the-earth types. There are no Jews in evidence. The daughter is living 1000 miles away and her future husband is objectionable to Schmidt because he's a "nincompoop" and his family, rather than being successful happily married Jewish psychiatrists, consists of divorced white trash-y New Age-y folks. The movie Schmidt, played by Jack Nicholson, is unrelievedly sad and pathetic. There are no romances with young women for movie Schmidt (no romances with any women, actually). Maybe we should give Hollywood for making a movie that is substantially darker than an already fairly dark novel.
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