Books: The Lincoln Highway By Amor Towles (2021)

“In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York.”

For the most part, The Lincoln Highway works for me. I like Towles’ work, as he has rich imagination and prose style all his own. But the book left me a bit confused. Mostly, I thought, this was about Emmett and his brother Billy leaving to California for a new, fresh start and thus they were the main characters here. However, much more of the book, it seems, is Duchess and Woolly’s story. Sure, Emmett is just one character amongst the others, and the book is told through multiple points of view, yet about a quarter way through the tome, I felt the storyline was disconnecting me. Perhaps after my enjoyment out of his two previous novels set me to want to adore this epic tale, but I felt a lot happened over a nine day or so period that seems rather amazing, considering it is set in 1954 and Lincoln Highway (which is real and still exists in the 21^st Century) was not the super fast roads of today. Or that the side characters like Sally, Ulysses, and Abacus, are not really vital to plot. It was also obvious Sally was merely there to make sure there was a woman in the book. Anyways, at times, these unfocused parts made the book feel bloated.

Of course, what I write above does not mean this book is all bad. I still enjoy Towles's writing, even if I felt not connected to the story fully. Much like his two previous books, he offers bits of wisdom wrapped up in some silly, sometimes, slapstick humor. It works for a while, but I guess I was expecting more. I’m disappointed in myself for assuming all his books were brilliant.

Books: A Gentleman in Moscow By Amor Towles (2016)

 

"A Gentleman in Moscow begins in 1922, when Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal. The count is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him a doorway into a much larger world of emotional discovery.”

 

A lot of this book seems a bit improbable, at times, which is not to say is a bad thing. It also can be dense with a bit too many historical observations of Russia and Moscow during the Stalin era, which at times, makes the book a bit busy and overcrowded. On the other hand, though, these passages seemly have little to do with the plot, so I often pondered if the tale could’ve worked if it was set in Paris, London, or even in Germany during the same period. Also, as one reviewer pointed out, this book is like Eloise, “if Eloise were set in a twee version of Stalinist Russia.”

 

There is a lot of impish humor here, as the Count tallies his days and nights in the Metropol with an assortment of people, including a moody chef and a French maître d’. The arrival of nine year-old Nina early in the book gives the Count many days of fun, as she is clever and most articulate. They, like his other friends, have several capers and this sort makes perpetual bachelor feel a sense of pride (though years later, when Nina has married, she returns to the hotel with some cautious, hidden worlds dealing with goings on against Stalin and asks the count to take care of her daughter Sofia for maybe a month or two. Obviously the reader can surmise that Nina won’t be coming back anytime soon). Then the Count must worry about people noticing he’s taking care of a 5-year-old girl.

 

Still, as the decades unfurl, the as Nina becomes an accomplished musician, the Count’s long-game continues on. Highlights include one of the capers where the Count, the chef, and the maître d' conspire to scrounge the ingredients for a perfect bouillabaisse from war-depleted Moscow. It takes three years, but when everything has been acquired, there is a mostly humorous set piece on how they try to keep this hidden from a sinister hotel waiter and a man known as the Bishop.

 

For those itching to get out now that spring and summer are around the corner along with the lifting of quarantine due to the COVID, they may not want to take the time to read this charming book due to its verbal density, but it’s rewarding in the end and just as much a valentine (as was Amor Towles Rules of Civility) to an era when books were a bit more complex and literary. Were words and kindness was the way of the world.

Books: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (2011)

"On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar with her boardinghouse roommate stretching three dollars as far as it will go when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a tempered smile, happens to sit at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a yearlong journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool toward the upper echelons of New York society and the executive suites of Condé Nast--rarefied environs where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve. Wooed in turn by a shy, principled multi-millionaire, and an irrepressible Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, befriended by a single-minded widow who is ahead of her time, and challenged by an imperious mentor, Katey experiences firsthand the poise secured by wealth and station and the failed aspirations that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her life, she begins to realize how our most promising choices inevitably lay the groundwork for our regrets."

Amor Towles debut novel, Rules Of Civility, is a Valentine, a love letter to a much earlier time in America, set during the Depression of the 1930s and before the onslaught of WWII. It has wit, style, charm, and drama that will remind anyone found of some Hollywood films that came out in that period. We have Katey Kontent, who through sheer coincidence and smarts gets a chance to see how the “other” half lives. But Towles does not give us a fool, as Katey is very much aware of her situations and keeps her mostly on the peripheral side of this high society.

Towles brings 1930’s New York to life in ways that are astounding and magical and gives (at times) a thoroughly modern and brilliantly smart woman in the form of Katey. Part of this modernism aspect may have to do with our narrator telling this story in 1966 and her sayings and wordings are a product of her middle-aged mind looking back, but it does not interrupt the narrative flow too much. But again, there is a lot of coincidences and some conveniences that pop up here –but I think that’s part of what Towles was trying to imitate here, that Katey’s story can be a bit unrealistic for the time period but that’s what made this era sort of magical. 

It's a fairly wonderful novel, even if a bit unrealistic.