The plot concerns three men who were—through either the intelligent design of an omniscient, beneficent Harvard administrator or, more likely, through inattentive chance—assigned as one another’s roommates as Harvard freshmen in the early 1950’s. Do we inhabit a universe arranged with an eye toward our well-being, or is it rather cosmically indifferent to our desires? To suggest that the metaphysical conundrum finds a dim echo in the mystery of dorm assignments is, of course, somewhat ridiculous—though in the context of the novel, not altogether so. The point of view is canted toward the undergraduate, an oddity that, oddly, contributes toward its eventual swell of pathos.

Harvard at midcentury wasn’t precisely a model of meritocracy. Inherited privilege dominated the game, with the semiotics of clothes and bearing—all the accoutrements of self—interpreted with pitiless accuracy. Despite the surface differences between the three roommates, there are profound similarities that join them together. None is easy in his skin, and Harvard’s clammy clubbiness only exacerbates the condition. Each has, to some extent, disowned his past, at least in the form of his parents. This is particularly true for two of the roommates: Sam Standish, the narrator of Matters of Honor, and Henry White, the book’s primary focus.

Sam Standish is a novelist who has met with some success, as we come to learn much later in the book, almost as a by-the-by. His homosexuality is also deduced from dropped asides; it’s not a subject that the three friends ever address directly. Vagueness and indirection are Standish’s preferred modes, especially when it comes to divulging details about himself. The name Standish not only suggests the right sort of upper-crust stuff but also someone standing off—standoffish, as it were. Obliquity as a literary style and outsider status as a theme have prevailed in Mr. Begley’s seven previous novels; and at least two of these, The Man Who Was Late (1992) and As Max Saw It (1994), use the technique of one man telling the story of another without fully grasping it from the inside, as is the case here.

Archie, the third roommate, is a likeable Army brat whose parents are just as distant and ineffectual as Standish’s, though Archie seems to have internalized their vapidity more effectively. In his tender youth, he’s already well on his way to becoming an effective shirker of unpleasant truths, as well as an accomplished drunk. But it’s Henry White who is the real point of Matters of Honor, delivering it from what might have been a dated tale of mild debauchery, disappointment and decline among the Auchincloss crowd into a moving tale of squandered talents, thwarted dreams and the incalculable toll exacted by bigotry.

That it’s Henry White who’s the fulcrum of the story is made clear from the stunning opening paragraph. “This is my first memory of Henry: I stand at the door of one of three bedrooms of the ground floor suite in the college dormitory to which I have been assigned. At the open window, with his back to me, a tall, slender, red-haired boy is leaning out and waving to someone. He has heard my footsteps, turns, and beckons to me saying, Take a look, a beautiful girl is blowing kisses to me. I’ve never seen her before. She must be mad.” In writing as spare and controlled as this, we can be certain that the first sight of Henry, “with his back to me,” is deadly deliberate. Standish, who himself stands with his back to the reader, maneuvers throughout the book to gain full sight of the boy who’s staring longingly at that elusive girl.

Henry has arrived at Harvard on the basis of his brains, which are considerable, not his background, which could hardly have been less conducive toward his ending up gazing out a window overlooking Harvard Yard. There’s a slight accent lurking behind his careful pronunciation; the roommates learn that he had come from Poland in 1947. Standish says, “whether Henry was a Jew was a question Archie and I had discussed more than once without reaching a definitive conclusion.” But then, the two roommates reason, if he truly were a Polish Jew, how could he have survived the war? He survived, we later learn, because he was hidden, along with his mother, in a sealed room that had been offered to them by his mother’s old Latin teacher at the gimnazjum. His father was hidden somewhere else, and all three survived the war. “[W]hen the Russians chased the Germans out of Krakow, we staggered into the street like people who had been trapped in a mine.”

Henry, who majors in classics despite his having so emphatically missed out on the right tutelage, is still imperceptibly staggering when Standish meets him. He staggers for decades, despite his efforts to transform himself by what and whom he encountered at Harvard. Standish is not one to plumb the full depths of what it is that Henry is staggering away from. He can’t pierce the nullity to which Henry strives to reduce the past, into which he sacrifices his two desperately dysfunctional parents. There’s nothing from that past to which he’s heir, and the relationships that Henry enacts with the heirs and heiresses of the world, to which his Harvard connections will lead him, only betray him. Though Mr. Begley doesn’t entirely violate his belief in the ultimate mystery of character, we manage to glean enough about what makes and breaks Henry White to move us profoundly.

Mr. Begley’s strategic silences can at times frustrate aesthetic demands. So, for example, he lays out a mystery regarding Standish’s identity: Although he was adopted, his physical attributes declare him a Standish, as does the trust fund set up for him by his grandfather. But the mystery is simply left dangling; the skeleton in the closet grinningly keeps its secret from the reader. I suppose a conclusion as to the impenetrable opacity of identity can be drawn. Still, can the metaphysical conclusion—justified though it may be—altogether fill the narrative gap?

Toward the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus declare that his defenses will be silence, exile and cunning. Those three words perfectly sum up the tone, theme and technique of this latest in Louis Begley’s powerful oeuvre. I would judge, on the basis of his writing, that the author is a man of refined skepticisms, which makes his faith in his readers all the more impressive. His technique demands attention—and richly rewards it.

Rebecca Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist; her most recent book is Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Schocken).

Daniel Mendelsohn’s extraordinary The Lost brought my childhood conviviality test vividly back to me, as well as the haze of confused quasi-knowledge that surrounded it. Like many of us (his memoir made me wonder how many), Mr. Mendelsohn reveals himself, cultural critic and public intellectual though he may be, as not completely contemporary. A large portion of his edgily attentive psyche is haunted by nightmare events that transpired long before his birth, so that his memory struggles to impossibly reverse itself, to gather up the details of seemingly irrecoverable lives and tragic ends.

What distinguishes Mr. Mendelsohn from the rest of us semi-haunted quasi-contemporaries is that he actually undertook the task of relentlessly tracking down those lost lives and deaths: his family’s own six among the six million. He succeeds in carving out the shape of individuals from the block of marmoreal martyrdom we call the Holocaust. He traveled the world, interviewing very old people and—through the combination of the research skills of a classicist and the sheer luck that often dictated who among the hunted succeeded in eluding the hunters—recovers the members of his family from that jumble of indistinguishable corpses.

The resulting book is a memoir, but it’s also something more. It accomplishes what many of us would do if we had both the skill and obsession required to recover our own nameless lost. When Mr. Mendelsohn succeeds in his unspeakably sad and yet also triumphant and therefore joyful project of recovery, it feels to me like a success for all of us—by which I mean the kind of people whose psyches were partly formed by overhearing such stories as would make a child wonder who among her friends would hide her.

In his earlier memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999), Mr. Mendelsohn described himself as a hybrid character, symbolically suspended between two geographical locales: a suburb of New Jersey, where he was helping to raise the young child of a friend, and the corner of Manhattan, 23rd and Eighth, dubbed “The Intersection of Desire” by Chelsea’s gay habitués. In The Lost, he gives us another geographical location laying claim to him, one more distant from the Intersection of Desire than even suburban New Jersey. The name of this place is Bolechow, as the Jews who had once lived there called it, though now, Judenrein, it’s called exclusively by its Ukrainian name, Bolekhiv.

His mother’s family—his grandiloquent grandfather, whose author-adored presence is prominent in both of Mr. Mendelsohn’s memoirs, as well as his grandfather’s family—had come from this little corner of the former Pale of Settlement, and Mr. Mendelsohn’s project of recovery takes him back to Bolekhiv often enough so that it begins to feel almost familiar. His project also takes him to Israel, Australia, Sweden and Denmark, interviewing former “Bolechowers,” constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing the narratives of the six he’s seeking.

It takes an obsession to undertake Mr. Mendelsohn’s task, and perhaps the scene with which he begins his book goes as far as it’s possible to go to explain the origins of his: “Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry.” The tears of these elderly Jews were caused by the young Daniel’s reputed resemblance to his grandfather’s oldest brother, Samuel Jäger—Shmiel in Yiddish. Shmiel had reversed the trajectory of most immigrants, going back to the old country, to Bolechow, the town in which the Jägers had lived for “as long as there had been a Bolechow,” because Shmiel, a “kingly” sort of a man, a man with the family flair for self-dramatization (a necessity, too, for a memoirist) wanted to be “a big fish in a little pond.” And so it was that Shmiel and his wife Ester and their four daughters, Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia, were murdered by the Nazis.

Their four beautiful daughters, I should add, since the overheated family romance insisted that they were beautiful, even though their names weren’t known until Mr. Mendelsohn began his quest. One of the rewards of this book, which is illustrated by photographs (some taken by the author’s brother, Matt Mendelsohn, who accompanied him on a good part of this odyssey), is watching the author being overtaken by the seriousness of his story, so that the sense with which he’d started—that his six, being his, would turn out to be more fabulous than the other 5,999,994—is subtly discarded for something far more humane and universal. “The real story was that they’d been ordinary, and had lived, and then died, like so many others.”

The rhapsodizing about the death of young beauty and about the beauty of young death that had sounded a repetitive theme in The Elusive Embrace is here silenced by the awful nature of the truths uncovered. The aestheticization of death is obscene in the face of genocide. There is no beauty to be found in the degradations to which these Nazi-slain were subjected, no aesthetics in these lives reduced to the sheer animal instincts for elemental survival: hiding in haystacks, in holes dug with fingers in the earth. Though I’m not certain the author would agree, it seemed to me that the story he works toward in The Lost gradually renders him less a Hellenist, enthralled to an image of heroic, beautiful death, and more Hebraic, cherishing life for life’s sake and seeing death as defilement.

One can, of course, imagine the effect on an imaginative boy of being linked in the tears of his relatives to his murdered great-uncle. The epitaph to the book is the poignant response of Virgil’s Aeneas, the young Trojan prince who is one of the few survivors of the destruction of Troy, when, wandering far from the city, he visits a temple and sees a mural depicting the Trojan War. What is material for Carthaginian decorative art is the stuff of tragedy for the Trojan Aeneas, a deep truth that Virgil gives utterance to in the immortal line Sunt lacrimae rerum, which the author translates as “There are tears in things.”

There is a brief, lovely passage in which Mr. Mendelsohn links the story of Aeneas to his own quest in The Lost, and this linking reminded me, too, of the use that Louis Begley made of the Aeneas myth in his celebrated first novel, Wartime Lies. As it happens, Louis Begley plays a part in Mr. Mendelsohn’s book, but mostly for being the son of the indomitable “Mrs. Begley,” with whom the author, in the service of his recovery project, comes to share a quirkily loving relationship. Mrs. Begley had come from Stryj, a town neighboring Bolechow, and she helps the author to grasp her lost world. She accuses him—both dismissively and indulgently, he says—of being a “sentimental person.” She was—she died in 2004—the very opposite of a sentimental person. The survivors’ “amazing stories” elicit her leveling response: “If you didn’t have an amazing story, you didn’t survive,” she tells the author coldly.

Though Mr. Mendelsohn does occasionally avail himself of his Greek scholarship in this book, it’s the first few chapters of the Hebrew Bible around which he creates the book’s structure. He only utilizes the sections that go up to the chapter called Vayeira—literally, “He will appear”—since, as Mr. Mendelsohn frankly confesses, that’s as far as he got in his “Jewish homeschooling program.” But despite the seeming haphazardness of the framing device, leaving off where Mr. Mendelsohn tired of his Bible study, it works—at least for the most part. Perhaps this is because the nature of The Lost’s story, of those who survived and how they did and those who didn’t and how they didn’t, is one that highlights the sheer contingencies upon which everything depends. The mirroring tale of Mr. Mendelsohn’s quest to track down his lost is also replete with coincidence and accident.

The Biblical artifice is meant, of course, to place his family’s story in the context of one of the most significant family narratives that mankind has ever told itself. In this case, the tone of fraught significance is earned, finally carrying the tale of one man—obsessed in his particular way with his own life and family—beyond the bounds of the memoir.

I finished The Lost late at night, after returning from an end-of-summer dinner party given by some Truro neighbors. It’s a measure of the degree to which I was affected by Daniel Mendelsohn’s stunning achievement that I woke up the next morning with a single question condensing itself out of the haze of my dreams.

Would those charming people hide me and my loved ones if ever the Nazis came to Cape Cod?

Rebecca Goldstein is the author of five novels; her most recent book is Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Schocken).

Daniel Mendelsohn’s extraordinary The Lost brought my childhood conviviality test vividly back to me, as well as the haze of confused quasi-knowledge that surrounded it. Like many of us (his memoir made me wonder how many), Mr. Mendelsohn reveals himself, cultural critic and public intellectual though he may be, as not completely contemporary. A large portion of his edgily attentive psyche is haunted by nightmare events that transpired long before his birth, so that his memory struggles to impossibly reverse itself, to gather up the details of seemingly irrecoverable lives and tragic ends.

What distinguishes Mr. Mendelsohn from the rest of us semi-haunted quasi-contemporaries is that he actually undertook the task of relentlessly tracking down those lost lives and deaths: his family’s own six among the six million. He succeeds in carving out the shape of individuals from the block of marmoreal martyrdom we call the Holocaust. He traveled the world, interviewing very old people and—through the combination of the research skills of a classicist and the sheer luck that often dictated who among the hunted succeeded in eluding the hunters—recovers the members of his family from that jumble of indistinguishable corpses.

The resulting book is a memoir, but it’s also something more. It accomplishes what many of us would do if we had both the skill and obsession required to recover our own nameless lost. When Mr. Mendelsohn succeeds in his unspeakably sad and yet also triumphant and therefore joyful project of recovery, it feels to me like a success for all of us—by which I mean the kind of people whose psyches were partly formed by overhearing such stories as would make a child wonder who among her friends would hide her.

In his earlier memoir, The Elusive Embrace (1999), Mr. Mendelsohn described himself as a hybrid character, symbolically suspended between two geographical locales: a suburb of New Jersey, where he was helping to raise the young child of a friend, and the corner of Manhattan, 23rd and Eighth, dubbed “The Intersection of Desire” by Chelsea’s gay habitués. In The Lost, he gives us another geographical location laying claim to him, one more distant from the Intersection of Desire than even suburban New Jersey. The name of this place is Bolechow, as the Jews who had once lived there called it, though now, Judenrein, it’s called exclusively by its Ukrainian name, Bolekhiv.

His mother’s family—his grandiloquent grandfather, whose author-adored presence is prominent in both of Mr. Mendelsohn’s memoirs, as well as his grandfather’s family—had come from this little corner of the former Pale of Settlement, and Mr. Mendelsohn’s project of recovery takes him back to Bolekhiv often enough so that it begins to feel almost familiar. His project also takes him to Israel, Australia, Sweden and Denmark, interviewing former “Bolechowers,” constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing the narratives of the six he’s seeking.

It takes an obsession to undertake Mr. Mendelsohn’s task, and perhaps the scene with which he begins his book goes as far as it’s possible to go to explain the origins of his: “Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry.” The tears of these elderly Jews were caused by the young Daniel’s reputed resemblance to his grandfather’s oldest brother, Samuel Jäger—Shmiel in Yiddish. Shmiel had reversed the trajectory of most immigrants, going back to the old country, to Bolechow, the town in which the Jägers had lived for “as long as there had been a Bolechow,” because Shmiel, a “kingly” sort of a man, a man with the family flair for self-dramatization (a necessity, too, for a memoirist) wanted to be “a big fish in a little pond.” And so it was that Shmiel and his wife Ester and their four daughters, Lorka, Frydka, Ruchele and Bronia, were murdered by the Nazis.

Their four beautiful daughters, I should add, since the overheated family romance insisted that they were beautiful, even though their names weren’t known until Mr. Mendelsohn began his quest. One of the rewards of this book, which is illustrated by photographs (some taken by the author’s brother, Matt Mendelsohn, who accompanied him on a good part of this odyssey), is watching the author being overtaken by the seriousness of his story, so that the sense with which he’d started—that his six, being his, would turn out to be more fabulous than the other 5,999,994—is subtly discarded for something far more humane and universal. “The real story was that they’d been ordinary, and had lived, and then died, like so many others.”

The rhapsodizing about the death of young beauty and about the beauty of young death that had sounded a repetitive theme in The Elusive Embrace is here silenced by the awful nature of the truths uncovered. The aestheticization of death is obscene in the face of genocide. There is no beauty to be found in the degradations to which these Nazi-slain were subjected, no aesthetics in these lives reduced to the sheer animal instincts for elemental survival: hiding in haystacks, in holes dug with fingers in the earth. Though I’m not certain the author would agree, it seemed to me that the story he works toward in The Lost gradually renders him less a Hellenist, enthralled to an image of heroic, beautiful death, and more Hebraic, cherishing life for life’s sake and seeing death as defilement.

One can, of course, imagine the effect on an imaginative boy of being linked in the tears of his relatives to his murdered great-uncle. The epitaph to the book is the poignant response of Virgil’s Aeneas, the young Trojan prince who is one of the few survivors of the destruction of Troy, when, wandering far from the city, he visits a temple and sees a mural depicting the Trojan War. What is material for Carthaginian decorative art is the stuff of tragedy for the Trojan Aeneas, a deep truth that Virgil gives utterance to in the immortal line Sunt lacrimae rerum, which the author translates as “There are tears in things.”

There is a brief, lovely passage in which Mr. Mendelsohn links the story of Aeneas to his own quest in The Lost, and this linking reminded me, too, of the use that Louis Begley made of the Aeneas myth in his celebrated first novel, Wartime Lies. As it happens, Louis Begley plays a part in Mr. Mendelsohn’s book, but mostly for being the son of the indomitable “Mrs. Begley,” with whom the author, in the service of his recovery project, comes to share a quirkily loving relationship. Mrs. Begley had come from Stryj, a town neighboring Bolechow, and she helps the author to grasp her lost world. She accuses him—both dismissively and indulgently, he says—of being a “sentimental person.” She was—she died in 2004—the very opposite of a sentimental person. The survivors’ “amazing stories” elicit her leveling response: “If you didn’t have an amazing story, you didn’t survive,” she tells the author coldly.

Though Mr. Mendelsohn does occasionally avail himself of his Greek scholarship in this book, it’s the first few chapters of the Hebrew Bible around which he creates the book’s structure. He only utilizes the sections that go up to the chapter called Vayeira—literally, “He will appear”—since, as Mr. Mendelsohn frankly confesses, that’s as far as he got in his “Jewish homeschooling program.” But despite the seeming haphazardness of the framing device, leaving off where Mr. Mendelsohn tired of his Bible study, it works—at least for the most part. Perhaps this is because the nature of The Lost’s story, of those who survived and how they did and those who didn’t and how they didn’t, is one that highlights the sheer contingencies upon which everything depends. The mirroring tale of Mr. Mendelsohn’s quest to track down his lost is also replete with coincidence and accident.

The Biblical artifice is meant, of course, to place his family’s story in the context of one of the most significant family narratives that mankind has ever told itself. In this case, the tone of fraught significance is earned, finally carrying the tale of one man—obsessed in his particular way with his own life and family—beyond the bounds of the memoir.

I finished The Lost late at night, after returning from an end-of-summer dinner party given by some Truro neighbors. It’s a measure of the degree to which I was affected by Daniel Mendelsohn’s stunning achievement that I woke up the next morning with a single question condensing itself out of the haze of my dreams.

Would those charming people hide me and my loved ones if ever the Nazis came to Cape Cod?

Rebecca Goldstein is the author of five novels; her most recent book is Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity (Schocken).