Two novels by Amor Towles:
Rules of Civility (Penguin, 2011)
The Lincoln Highway (Penguin, 2021)
Katey and Eve start 1938 literally without two nickels to rub together. They have gone to a dive bar to hear some gloomy jazz, when in walks a handsome, well-dressed man, who winds up sitting at their table. The young women have no social standing whatever, but their new friend Tinker Grey is a banker of some kind, and a resident of a fancy apartment on Central Park West. Rules of Civility is Katey’s reminiscence, from thirty years on, of the eventful year that follows.
1938 finds New York still mired in the Depression. Katey and Eve share a room in a boarding house and scrape an entry-level living; Katey because she has no family left, and Eve because she’s unwilling to accept help from her family in the midwest. The next eight months will find Eve travelling in the south of France, and Katey maneuvering her career into a track with a future. Katey’s social life takes a commensurate turn for the richer, involving wild parties in the Hamptons and a ‘camp’ in the Adirondacks. In general, though, it’s a New York life, lived in coffee shops, offices, taxicabs, and the occasional club.
The Lincoln Highway occupies a much wider canvas. It begins in a tiny town in Nebraska, where Emmett Watson is coming home from eighteen months in a Kansas prison for juveniles. It’s 1954; his father, a failed farmer, has died, and Emmett is now responsible for his eight-year-old brother, Billy. They are planning to take Emmett’s car, and the ready money that remains, and head for California. But here comes trouble: two other young men have slipped away from the reformatory by stowing away in the trunk of Emmett’s ride home.
Duchess is mad enough to avail himself of such a chance. His father is a traveling actor, the spiritual heir to the king and the duke in Huckleberry Finn, more than half a con man. Duchess is a wily kid with a talent for picking up things that don’t belong to him; and while he hasn’t had much practice with assault and battery, he picks it right up when he sees a need for it.
He has brought along Woolly, who’s a few bubbles off plumb. According to Duchess, “[H]e’s always running about five minutes late, showing up on the wrong platform with the wrong luggage just as the conversation is pulling out of the station.” Woolly has had some advantages in life, but he’s temperamentally unsuited to make the most of them: how do you get kicked out of three of the most exclusive boarding schools in New England? How do you mess up so badly you wind up in Kansas? He’s fundamentally a kind fellow, though, and he makes friends with Billy, who is both smart and knowledgeable far beyond his years.
Agent of chaos that he is, Duchess takes off in Emmett’s car, headed in the wrong direction. He and Woolly have business in New York, involving some money that belongs to Woolly, which is in a safe at his family’s camp in the Adirondacks. Emmett and Billy follow by train, no small feat as most of their money departed with the light blue Studebaker. How in the world will Emmett find his friends, his car, and his money?
The Lincoln Highway is full of wonderful tangential stories. It reads like something Charles Portis might have written, in contrast to the earlier book’s overtones of Edith Wharton, Anton Chekhov, and Charles Dickens. Towles has a precise control of his characters’ voices. Here’s Duchess, on the notion that clothes make the man: “Gather together a group of men of every gradation–from the powerhouse to the putz–have them toss their fedoras in a pile, and you’ll spend a lifetime trying to figure out whose was whose. Because it’s the man who makes the fedora, not versa vice. I mean, wouldn’t you rather wear the hat worn by Frank Sinatra than the one worn by Sergeant Joe Friday? I should hope so.”
The books are connected, in fact, in a way that gave me particular delight: that camp in the Adirondacks is the same family place in both books; one character in Rules of Civility appears offstage in The Lincoln Highway. They also share an ethos: when you need help, look for the forgotten man, and listen to him. Emmett gets the right train to New York with the aid of a panhandler in a wheelchair. Katey gets a beautiful cache of journalistic gossip from doormen and elevator operators.
The characters Towles loves most have a sense of wonder. Tinker’s brother praises Tinker’s this way: “Anyone can buy a car or a night on the town. Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don’t mean gawking at the Chrysler Building. I’m talking about the wing of a dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine.” That’s the kind of wonder these books can leave you with.
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Codicil - the family that crosses the two books is actually part of my own; Woolly is called that because his middle name is Wolcott. The family consorts with Roosevelts in part because their second cousin married TR's first cousin - viz., my great grandparents. Wild!
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