By CRAIG TAYLOR SEPT. 23, 2016, New York Times
image from
A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW
By Amor Towles
462 pp. Viking. $27.
Beyond the door of the luxurious Hotel Metropol lies Theater Square and the
rest of Moscow, and beyond its city limits the tumultuous landscape of 20th-century
Russia. The year 1922 is a good starting point for a Russian epic, but for the
purposes of his sly and winning second novel, Amor Towles forgoes descriptions of
icy roads and wintry dachas and instead retreats into the warm hotel lobby. The
Metropol, with its customs and routines, is a world unto itself.
For years, its florist adhered to the code of polite society and knew “which flower
to send when one has been late; when one has spoken out of turn.” The barbershop
remained a kind of Switzerland, “a land of optimism, precision and political
neutrality.” As post-revolution scarcity set in, the chef of the upscale Boyarsky
restaurant worked magic with cornmeal, cauliflower and cabbage, while the
Shalyapin bar offered candlelight and dark corners so Bolshoi dancers could sneak a
postperformance drink. In the lobby, politicians whispered and movie starlets
swanned across the floor, dragging recalcitrant borzois on their leashes.
Towles’s novel spans a number of difficult decades, but no Bolshevik, Stalinist
or bureaucrat can dampen the Metropol’s life; World War II only briefly forces a
pause. A great hotel is eternal, and the tidal movement of individuals and ideas into
its lounges and ballrooms is a necessity for one longtime resident. He’s not difficult
to spot: a man who enacts a set of rituals and routines, grooming and dining,
conversing and brandy-drinking, before ascending each night to his room on the
sixth floor, which has barely enough space for his Louis XVI desk and ebony
elephant lamps.
Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov — a member of the Jockey Club, Master of the
Hunt — was already ensconced in luxury in Suite 317 when he was sentenced to
house arrest in a 1922 trial, condemned for writing a poem. Saved from a bullet to
the head or exile in Siberia because he was deemed a hero of the pre-revolutionary
cause, he has been forcefully installed on a new floor. But Rostov is an optimist: The
cramped room will at the very least keep him away from the Bolsheviks below,
clacking out directives on their typewriters. He bounces on the bedsprings and
observes that they’re creaking in G sharp. When he bangs his head on the slope of
the low ceiling, he announces: “Just so.”
Rostov is an aesthete, an intellectual who will maintain his resolve by committing to
the business of practicalities. Yet even with this aim, the walls begin to close in. As he
climbs the 110 steps to his room, he can’t wait to descend them again; he has begun,
early on in his confinement, to be “threatened by a sense of ennui — that dreaded
mire of the human emotions.”
What is a cultured man to do? Suicide is an obvious choice. (Just so!) But the
Metropol won’t let him simply drop and splatter from its roof. Towles has an
educational scheme for his protagonist: If the hotel contains the world, Towles
assiduously offers pleasures and lessons, room by room, as a reborn Rostov bears
witness to his era.
Solzhenitsyn this is not. The frost gathers outside, but the book proceeds with
intentional lightness. The tone is generally not far removed from the Fitzgeraldian
tributes of Towles’s first novel, “Rules of Civility.” The book is narrated not by
Rostov but by a hovering third person, sporting what seems to be a permanently
arched eyebrow, who occasionally lapses into aristocratic fussiness. Wonder
abounds. Secret panels open. A former juggler reaches out to grab a falling torte just
in time. One-eyed cats look away at crucial moments. Although its style is never
overbearing, the Metropol is imbued with a sense of idiosyncratic wonder. Listen
closely and you might hear a Wes Anderson soundtrack playing down the hall. We’re
not in the Grand Budapest, but more than once I imagined F. Murray Abraham
narrating a long, panning shot.
What of the Russia that lies beyond? When he stops pacing the floor, Rostov’s
anxious poet friend, Mishka, tells of his battles against censorship and hints that
Rostov’s confinement might ultimately be for the best, arguing that their country’s
great contribution to the world (at least one of them) is destruction: “For as a people,
we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created.”
Let us concede, our narrator dryly points out, that the early 1930s in Russia were
unkind.
Mishka is one of many walk-ins who will tell of Russia’s condition and change
Rostov’s static life. The movie star last seen dragging her barking borzois offers up
for study the constellation of beauty marks on her back. Americans flit through,
dispensing candy, cigarettes and opportunities. The most important introduction is
to a young girl named Nina, who has a ripe sense of curiosity and a skeleton key that
will allow her into any room, which is how Rostov splits his pants while contorting
on the balcony as a Bolshevik assembly argues agenda points in the ballroom below.
Zeligs don’t only have to appear in the frame of a newsreel. Rostov is always nudging
up to history, clinking glasses with foreign diplomats and discussing films with
Kremlin operators. Khrushchev makes an appearance.
But comrades must work, so the gentleman becomes a waiter. How important is
good service? Even as a youngster on the estate in Nizhny Novgorod, he understood
the power of a seating arrangement: “In fact, if Paris had not been seated next to
Helen when he dined in the court of Menelaus, there never would have been a Trojan
War.” In the era of jockeying Soviet apparatchiks, it’s a skill Rostov can repurpose.
Proper manners, he points out, always have their place. “Does a banquet really need
an asparagus server?” Nina asks at one point. “Does an orchestra need a bassoon?” is
Rostov’s reply.
As Nina grows up, her fervency and love of knowledge are transferred from the
science experiments she conducts in the ballroom to the diktats of the party. At the
beginning of the 1930s, Rostov catches sight of her in the lobby among a few adoring
male comrades, about to leave with some cadres of the local Komsomol to help
collectivize the provinces. She is dazzling, then gone. As the purges continue, Rostov
becomes the recipient of a gift from Nina even more precious than her skeleton key.
He handles the situation, and all other situations, with capability and aplomb.
What happens when a novel centers on a character so capable, so witty and at
ease in the world, even as that world convulses around him? Rostov has a portrait of
his long-dead sister on the wall of his room, so it’s evident his life is anchored in pain
— Russia is pain — but he remains untouchable, built to outwit the system. Part of
the problem is that Towles repeatedly invokes the tortured, challenged, hand-wringing,
deeply human characters of Russian literature. In contrast, Rostov seems
destined always to succeed.
Towles is a craftsman. What saves the book is the gorgeous sleight of hand that
draws it to a satisfying end, and the way he chooses themes that run deeper than
mere sociopolitical commentary: parental duty, friendship, romance, the call of
home. Human beings, after all, “deserve not only our consideration but our
reconsideration” — even those from the leisured class. Who will save Rostov from
the intrusions of the state if not the seamstresses, chefs, bartenders and doormen? In
the end, Towles’s greatest narrative effect is not the moments of wonder and
synchronicity but the generous transformation of these peripheral workers, over the
course of decades, into confidants, equals and, finally, friends. With them around, a
life sentence in these gilded halls might make Rostov the luckiest man in Russia.
The count “found political discourse of any persuasion to be tedious.”
Bolsheviks are a bore, getting in colloquiums and congresses to “levy complaints,
and generally clamor about the world’s oldest problems in its newest nomenclature.”
But even the gray Soviet world melts inside the golden warmth of the Metropol. The
transformation is what’s important. Rostov’s battles are less political and more
concerned with the fight against any gradual diminishment of pleasure.
At one point, he learns that the existence of a wine list, a monument to the
privilege of nobility, runs counter to the ideals of the revolution. Thus the 100,000
bottles in the Metropol’s cellar have had their labels removed, supposedly rendering
them blissfully equal. No matter. Our accomplished gentleman will overcome. Down
in the cellar, his talented fingers can still feel the telltale embossed ridges cut into a
particularly important bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape.
Craig Taylor, editor of the literary magazine Five Dials, is the author of “Londoners.”
A version of this review appears in print on September 25, 2016, on Page BR
No comments:
Post a Comment