A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

Imagine being confined to a hotel, not in a fancy suite with a view and room service, but in a sixth floor garret, dusty and cramped.  Imagine this after being born to a life of wealth and privilege.  You have been warned by the authorities that you will be shot if you should venture out of the hotel.  And imagine this for more than thirty years.  Such is the lot of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov in the era that followed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.  He is punished for the crime of having been a member of the “nobility” and for declining to repent his unchosen place in life, as none of us chooses the circumstances of our birth.  He is saved from execution only by virtue of his actions in support of workers during the turmoil of 1905, an uprising that was ultimately put down brutally by the Tsar.  But he is stripped of nearly all of his possessions, declared a “Former Person”, and confined to the Metropol Hotel in Moscow.  

The thing I like most about historical fiction is that it brings real characters and events into focus, and imagines the ways people must have felt.  On numerous occasions while reading this book I paused to look something up on the internet to see what was readily available.  The Metropol Hotel was, and still is, a fine hotel in Moscow, a short walk from Red Square, the Kremlin, the onion domes of St. Basil’s, and in easy sight of the Bolshoi.  It’s easy to look at in satellite view on mapping apps.  In another instance I found that, in their fierce opposition to collectivization, peasants in the early 1930’s did in fact slaughter their own livestock rather than turn it over to the state.  I find history fascinating.  Plus it seems events in real life are always more extreme, more unbelievable than in fiction.  No novelist would write the events of American politics over the past two decades because it’s just too contrived to be believable.

Back to the story, Count Rostov is a full-throated gentleman, not in the sense of feeling entitled to make demands of others, but in the sense of treating others with courtesy and respect, and always behaving with dignity.  His philosophy, manifested in his actions over the ensuing three decades boils down to this:  A man must master his circumstances or he will be mastered by them.  [Apologies to any women readers.  I’m just stating it as it would have been stated by a Russian gentleman in 1922.]  As it happens, the Metropol Hotel accommodates highly placed government apparatchiks, diplomats from other countries, and well-heeled travelers from around the world, in short, just the class of people the Count knows best.  Thus, without giving away essential details, I can affirm that the Count makes his place in the hotel and masters his circumstances as best could be imagined.

The political aspects of the story beg a comment.  Mr. Towles uses his characters to deliver insightful thoughts on the matter.  My thought is that, sure enough, in the days of the monarchy, there must have been people of privilege who, like Count Rostov, acted with decency and dignity, a credit to their class.  But there were also just as surely privileged rogues and incompetents who flaunted their unearned position.  After the revolution, when all were supposedly equal--obviously they were not.  Party officials most certainly celebrated lavishly in the same banquet halls of the Metropol that previously served nobles--the same wealth, or poverty, was shared by the competent and the incompetent alike.  Fools enjoyed unearned parity with those whose good works deserved greater rewards. In both regimes it’s the unearned position that rankled.  The United States, a meritocracy in principle, boasts equality of opportunity, with rewards proportionate to people’s good works.  That’s the principle.  I suppose the tension between that principle and reality will exist as long as the nation does, a part of the journey toward a more perfect union.  Viva the journey, long may it live!

Someone, by Alice McDermott

A warmly and touchingly told story of an ordinary life.  And there’s not a thing wrong with that.  It reminds me of the lyrics of a Paul McCartney’s song, “Some people think the world has had enough of silly love songs.  But I look around me and I see...it isn’t so.”  Marie is born in and lives out her life in Brooklyn, one of two children in a working class family, far from wealthy but not terribly poor either, gets hurt in love, then finds love and marries, bears and raises children, nothing out of the ordinary.  Nothing.  And yet it’s a story that draws you in.  Maybe it’s the ordinariness that feels familiar, and still important, as if the snub of one world leader by another is no more significant than a slight of one grade schooler by another.  The hurt is the same.  The small injuries and triumphs are familiar, relatable to all of us, I would think. 

Marie tells her story in first person, as it should of course be told, and she uses plain language, words you would not doubt would come from an ordinary girl from Brooklyn.  “...[she] blew some exasperated air from her pooched-out lip.”  “My father smelled, always, of fresh newsprint and cigarettes, of the alcohol in his faded cologne.”  McDermott makes rich use of smells throughout, the sense that most strongly piques our memory.  Her descriptive passages are vivid, so clear and simple I can picture the scene, I can feel it.  “I pushed my glasses back on my nose.  In the fading evening light, the stoop beneath my thighs, as warm as breath when I first sat down, now exhaled a shallow chill.  Mr. Chehab walked by with a brown bag from the bakery in his hand.  He had his white apron balled up beneath his arm, the ties trailing.   There was the scent of new-baked bread as he passed.”  An ordinary child observing and ordinary setting.  Nice.  

Of course there were moments that made me tear up a little, which is no great accomplishment given that I’m a sucker for touching moments.  But it would be a weakness if this book failed to elicit that response, given the kind of story it is. In a scene later in life, her brother has just been released from a mental institution following a breakdown, and she and her children are making small talk in the kitchen, pretending there’s no awkwardness in the situation.  Marie notices her brother still wears the hospital bracelet.  Without a break in the conversation, “I slipped the kitchen shears between the plastic cuff and the blue underside of his narrow wrist.  I neatly cut the think in half, then touched his knee before I carried the bracelet to the trash.”  She calls it “the thing” and disposes of it as if her action could dispose of the reason for his time in the mental institution just the same.  Very sweet. 

It sort of reminds me of stories by Anne Tyler, stories of no earth-shattering import, just ordinary people living their ordinary lives, but told in a way that feels important, feels familiar, feels true. Nice, pleasurable reading.