Amor Towles All Summer
"For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim."
Descriptive and beautiful writing trumps a good story with poor writing all day long. A full page of elaborate and descriptive text covering the decor of a dining room elucidates more for me than a snippy crime novel that ultimately leads to a twist of fate; those are a dime-a-dozen. Amor Towles seems to be a master of elaborate and well-garnished writing, an erudite in an era of short attention spans. This fine summer, I’ve crawled through Towles’ writing like a molasses snail.
After toiling with A Gentleman in Moscow (4.5/5), I went on to read Amor Towles’ latest work titled The Lincoln Highway. While the book was about a 3.5/5, it produced a couple gems for me that kept me sitting alongside the four boys in the Studebaker on their journey eastbound to New York on the Lincoln Highway. Lincoln Highway is an ode to epic and eventful road trips but as I traversed the pages, I dog-eared quite a few poignant points that captivated me in the delivery but also left me chuckling or pondering the takeaway. Allow me to share a few that hit frontal cortex for me:
What does it mean to settle a score? I was taught that the best revenge is living well - but sometimes a score just needs to be settled. Towles weaves in the scoreboard nature of a debt unpaid so well throughout the book - bringing it back in more ways than one.
The double sided trick of advertising: Selling the dream, not the product…
“At the beginning of a commercial, Woolly would listen gravely as the actor or actress articulated their particular dilemma. Like the tepid flavor of their menthol cigarettes or the grass stains on the their children’s pants. From Woolly’s expression, you could see that he not only shared in their distress, he had a looming suspicion that all quests for happiness were doomed to disappointment. But as soon as these beleaguered souls decided to try the new brand of this or that, Woolly’s expression would brighten, and when they discovered that the product in question had not only removed the lumps from their mashed potatoes but the lumps from their life, Woolly would break into a smile, looking uplifted and reassured.”
Heroes start their stories in the middle:
“But Homer didn’t begin his story at the beginning…Homer began his story in medias res, which means in the middle of the thing. He began in the ninth year of the war with the hero, Achilles, nursing his anger in his tent. And ever since then, this is the way that many of the greatest adventure stories have been told.”
As Billy interprets this, he turns to his brother and says:
“I am pretty sure that we are on our adventure, Emmett. But I won’t be able to make a start of setting it down until I know where the middle of it is.”
Burn down the paradox of choice with some wit:
“How was one to communicate an idea to another person if when one had something to say, one could choose from ten different words for every word in a sentence? The number of potential variations boggled the mind. So much so that shortly after arriving at St. Paul’s Woolly had gone to his math teacher, Mr. Kehlenbeck, and asked him if one had a sentence with ten words and each word could be substituted with ten other words, then how many sentences could there be? And without a moment’s hesitation, Mr. Kehlenbeck had gone to the chalkboard, scratched out a formula, and done a few quick calculations to prove incontrovertibly that the answer to Woolly’s question was ten billion. Well, when confronted with the revelation like that, how was one to even begin writing an answer to an essay question during end-of-term exams?
Nonetheless, Woolly had dutifully carried the thesaurus with him and set it down on his desk, where it remained snugly in its case, smirking at him with its tens of thousands of words that could be substituted one for the other. For the next year, it taunted, teased and goaded him until finally, one evening shortly before Thanksgiving break, Woolly had taken the thesaurus from its case, carried it down to the football field, doused it with some gasoline that he’d discovered in the crew coach’s launch, and set the dastardly thing on fire.”
When Woolly was thus confronted for his actions…
“A moment later, Mr. Harrington, the faculty representative, referred to it as a blaze. Then Dunkie Dunkle, the student council president, referred to it as a conflagration. And Woolly knew right then and there that no matter what he had to say, they were all going to take the side of the thesaurus.”
These were just a few of my favorites from Towles’ last book but I highly recommend reading The Gentleman in Moscow. If you don’t have the patience for it - enjoy the sparknotes here.