Reviews of three new books.   Schmidt Delivered by Louis Begley (Knopf, 272 pages, $25) CFans of Louis Begley's rightly praised About Schmidt will be glad to revisit the retired life of old Schmidtie, still wandering his Hamptons home and enjoying the sexual attentions of Carrie, the Puerto Rican waitress younger than his daughter. Here, however, an influential new character enters Schmidt's orbit in the person of Michael Mansour, a globe-trotting billionaire. Mansour's sudden, forceful friendship--as well as his meddling in nearly every aspect of Schmidt's existence--flatters Schmidt but also raises his considerable social and financial paranoia. What, Schmidt worries, is Mansour really after? Without a doubt, Begley is an admirable stylist--his prose flows with a sophisticated clarity that perfectly suits his main character. About Schmidt was a brilliant portrait of a fiercely intelligent man undergoing the identity crisis of sudden widowhood and retirement and only beginning to recognize his own capacities for selfishness and prejudice. Schmidt Delivered, unfortunately, lacks the very quality boldly stated in its predecessor's title, as it's really not "about Schmidt" at all. Instead, it's about everyone else: his daughter's crumbling marriage, Carrie's infidelity and Mansour's duplicity--all of which comes to Schmidt, and therefore us, secondhand. Schmidt is warned that he needs to get out more. Yet over and over again we watch him swim a few solitary laps, swill bourbon and nap while the real drama goes on elsewhere. The machinations of his final delivery are a bit convenient, especially from a writer of Begley's talent. Fans of About Schmidt will probably find this new volume hard to resist purchasing; whether they find it as satisfying as the original is another question. Dan DeWeese   Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars by Catherine Clinton (Simon & Schuster, 320 pages, $26) She was Britain's premier Shakespearean actress and North America's most eligible bachelorette. By the age of 24, she had amassed a respectable fortune and could have had her pick in men. So why, in 1834, did Fanny Kemble choose to marry a dull-witted Georgia plantation owner named Pierce Butler? Catherine Clinton insists it was for both love and money, but the match was doomed by the honeymoon's end. Butler not only put an end to Fanny's acting career but gambled away half his estate and cheated on Fanny with just about everyone. For her part, Kemble maintained her fiercely independent spirit, penning caustic observations of life in America that would embarrass her husband and scandalize the nation. Kemble's embattled marriage was the centerpiece of "civil wars" she would fight throughout her life: the financial struggle to support her theatrical family, recurring conflicts with her daughters over Butler's memory, her crusade against slavery under her own roof. Regrettably, Clinton devotes most of her book to Kemble's social calendar (parties, trips to the Berkshires, voyages to Europe) but precious few pages to her social activism. She heralds Kemble as "America's most unlikely abolitionist" although Fanny wouldn't consent to publish her memoirs of cruelty on the Butler plantation until 1863, almost a year after Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Her book was a runaway success, but it came a little late to have the same devastating effect as Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Here, Fanny Kemble emerges less as a daring social reformer than as a grande dame presiding over a 19th-century soap opera that captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Matt Buckingham     All the Names by José Saramago (Harcourt Brace, 256 pages, $24) "It passes and we don't even notice," the narrator says. "It was morning only a moment ago and now it's nearly dark, in fact, the afternoon was drawing to a close...that's what happens, when we listen to a conversation and don't pay attention, the most important things always escape us." At 50, Senhor José seems a model clerk at the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths, until one day he begins to steal cards for a personal collection--cards filled with the names of "actors, ballerinas, bishops and football players." Inadvertently, the card of a nobody, one of the faceless, becomes stuck to one of the famous. Of all the names in his cupboard, this name intrigues Senhor José in a way the others don't, and so he sets out to discover her fate. Nobel laureate José Saramago's All the Names works in metaphor overdrive. With strong Kafkaesque elements, each of Senhor José's discoveries is made all the more intriguing by the fact that neither he nor the reader knows exactly what it is he's looking for, and his adventures create a novel that is reflective, compassionate and humorous. It's a story of redemption, a spiritual contemplation from an author whom the Vatican called an "inveterate communist with anti-religious views." Memory, perception and their inherent deceptions play large roles in All the Names, but all in the service of its modest epiphanies. Throughout this understated novel, the 80-year-old Saramago seems to be gently saying, "This is some of what the world holds, and here are some ways to find a bit of life's beauty." Steven Fidel