I never did work out which characters are represented by the cover, if any.
Author: Amor Towles
Publication: 2011
Genre: Historical Fiction
I’ve been meaning to pick up this book ever since I read Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow two years ago and loved it. It didn’t disappoint.
Summary: Katey Kontent is a twenty-something Russian-American New Yorker working as a typist and living in a boardinghouse with her friend Eve in 1938. On the eve of the new year, Katey and Eve have a chance encounter with wealthy banker Tinker Grey, around whom much of the rest of the novel revolves. The title refers to Tinker’s copy of George Washington’s notes on good character, which serve as a commentary on the nature of polite society throughout the rest of the novel. After an unfortunate accident draws Tinker and Eve together, Katey proceeds to careen around the upper echelons of New York society while a series of colorful characters flit in and out of frame. She steadily climbs through a combination of wit, charm, happenstance, and, crucially, others’ benevolence disguised as happenstance. I realize this is rather similar to the lack of description given on the back cover, but it’s hard to say much more without giving away significant amounts of plot.
My take: This book is a quite a ride. Just when I thought it was going one way fairly reliably, it took an abrupt 90 degree turn. Characters that dominated the scene for sixty pages are suddenly thrown out in the cold, never to reappear. It’s a fun sort of keeping you guessing that makes you want to turn the page. Katey is an easy narrator to get along with. Towles’ writing is a delight, much in the same style as in Moscow. He has a lovely way of describing a setting in just enough detail so you can picture it while not getting bogged down in the fourteen graded hues of the sunset. Towles has a masterful ability to show rather than tell - to the point where I had to read quite carefully in key moments to make sure I got the implications of events correctly.
Some miscellaneous complaints: Nothing major, honestly! Perhaps that it compares unfavorably to Moscow, but that is hardly fair. I found the character of Wallace a bit too apt; he seemed added in after to fill a gap left in Katey’s year. Oddly enough, the trickle of information about Katey’s background early in the novel left me wondering if she had secrets that were crucial to the later plot; that didn’t really turn out to be the case. Red herring, I suppose.
Though the characters are put through their paces, the results are (spoilers) given away by a reference to Agatha Christie’s novels in act three. Her works, as well as this novel, are satisfying because “men and women, whatever their ages, whatever their caste, are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them.” I certainly found it so. I’m glad to have spent some time with this little slice of the past and I hope Towles will pen a few more like it.