Tag: Amor Towles

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles – Book

From a Google Image Search – CBS News

In Amor Towles book, The Lincoln Highway, Billy Watson, young brother of main character Emmett, has been staying with a neighbor, Sally. His brother was serving a sentence at a juvenile work farm, his father recently died, and Billy is living out of his backpack which he keeps very close. In the backpack, along with his collection of silver dollars, is his treasured edition of Professor Abacus Abernathe’s Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and other Intrepid Travelers. These heroes whether mythical or real are beginning a new journey to complete a task or find something that is lost or to take care of a responsibility that has been entrusted to them. In other words, they are on a quest.

As the brothers are going through their father’s things they discover postcards from their mother, who left them on a memorable Fourth of July. The postcards, addressed to the boys show the stops their mom made on her trip west and the postcards stop at San Francisco, suggesting that that is where she may have settled to begin her new life. The thing they know for sure about her is that she loved fireworks and never missed an Independence Day display. Billy also knew from his mom’s postcard that there was such a spectacle every Fourth in San Francisco. Emmett loves his brother and he wants to please him but he wants to go to Texas. He was an apprentice to a local builder and now he wants to buy and restore houses, but he needs a city that is growing. After some research in the library (it’s the fifties, no internet, no cell phones) he discovers that San Francisco is growing even faster than Texas. The brothers agree to go to San Francisco on the Lincoln Highway, a real American highway that runs from coast to coast. 

Every good quest meets with obstacles and this quest is no exception. Two of Emmett’s incarcerated friends show up at the repossessed farm as the brothers prepare to leave. They have not been legally released from their sentences. Duchess and Woolly are two very different individuals. Woolly may have a slight mental disability, but he was born into a wealthy family. His father died and he is set to inherit a fairly large sum of money. Duchess is an opportunist. He never had a stable place to rest his head; his father was an itinerant actor who was often drunk. Duchess has a certain charisma though, and he has a ton of nerve. He doesn’t want to go to San Francisco. He wants to go to New York City to collect Woolly’s fortune. So he and a reluctant Woolly steal the car that Emmett paid for with his own apprentice pay and he leaves Emmett and Billy to find their own way to San Francisco. If a quest must have obstacles this twist is the first in a long line of them. It forces Emmett and Billy to follow Duchess and Woolly to New York City, not only to recover the car but to retrieve the envelop containing the $3,000 their father left for them in the well with the spare tire. 

Take the Lincoln Highway on this wild quest and you will meet more heroes and villains than you have in many a day. And you will discover that ordinary people often contain the stuff of heroes, and villains. Amor Towles writes about the quirks of human nature in ways that allow us to focus on what is best about us and what is worst about us. It’s a long journey but it goes quickly and yet the heroes pace is slowed by many astonishing events.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles – Book

We live in a time when civility and charm seem difficult to find and tempers are on a short fuse. Even a trip to the grocery store can seem like negotiating a mine field of human hostility. People disconnect from fellow shoppers and single-mindedly rush to get items crossed off their errand list. All they long for is to get home to their personal sanctuary. In times like these, Amor Towles is just the antidote required to inspire introspection and self-evaluation. Perhaps he will even help us change the way we relate to the world. A Gentleman in Moscow, although just a fiction story, makes a point that could transform us all.

Our gentleman in Moscow, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, Member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt, is 33 years old when we first meet him in 1922. He is a man caught between two ages in Russian history so disparate as to induce whiplash. He is an aristocrat who returns, to his peril, to Russia from Paris in 1918, which if you know your history, is just after the Russian Revolution when Russian society gets turned over like a compost pile. What was on the bottom is now on the top and what was on the top is now, for the most part, either dead or in Siberia.

But Count Rostov is such a benign style of aristocrat that he manages to wend his way through the anger and revolutionary righteousness of the new Communist state, not completely unscathed, but as a permanent resident of a luxurious Russian hotel right near the center of Moscow. Rostov has never held a job, has never been a worker, but he is trained by his former lifestyle to have skills that are quite useful to have. He is a great judge of human interaction and he knows how to arrange people at a state dinner or in a well-run restaurant so that any strife is defused and affairs run smoothly. Besides this talent he is charming and amenable and flexible in the face of change. His good nature is adaptable but he is not a chameleon; he is always himself.

Count Rostov’s punishment for coming back to Russia at exactly the wrong time is that he is imprisoned in the lovely Metropole Hotel where he has been living for four years. When asked by the tribunal why he came back he says he missed the climate and they all shake their heads in understanding. He has to give up a large suite of rooms with excellent views that he has been occupying and move into servant’s quarters in the attic. If you think that once sentence has been passed this tale will turn gloomy and scary then you have not yet met our Alexander. He’s in a hotel. Things happen. You may find that you have to “suspend your disbelief” a bit but it will be well worth it.

Amor Towles, author of Rules of Civility writes like times that are past and gone, like one who is on earth to remind us of slower times when people were kinder and more (heaven forbid) socially correct. It was a balm to my spirit to read A Gentleman in Moscow at this particularly pugilistic moment in the history of our nation.