Amor Towles (58) says he has been writing fiction since he was in high school. “One of the most interesting aspects of the writing process is to nail down an idiosyncratic perspective,” he says over a video call. “Rules of Civility (2011) is from the perspective of a 25-year-old woman from a working class background in 1938, while A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) draws from the central character’s tone. He is an aristocrat, born in the 19th century in Russia and living in the Soviet era.”
Raised in the school of thought that a young writer should practise writing from different perspectives, Towles says, “Today a young writer might be told that they do not have the right to write from a particular perspective. That didn’t exist as a notion when I was young. I am glad because it allowed me to hone the art of inventing individuals and hearing what they sound like.”
Listening in
It is second nature now, says Towles . “When I am creating a story I am immediately listening for who these people are.” An outliner, Towles says he spends a few years designing a book. For his latest book, The Lincoln Highway (Penguin Random House), the idea was about an 18-year-old, Emmett, returning home from a work farm with two other 18-year-olds, Duchess and Woolly, traveling along, hidden in the trunk of the warden’s car.
“I always knew the story takes place over 10 days, it was set in the mid-50s, it starts in the Midwest and ends in New York—those were things I knew in the first 24 hours. My original intention for The Lincoln Highway was to tell the story from two perspectives — Emmett’s and Duchess.”
Two archetypal upbringings
Emmett, the Manhattan-based author says, has a toned-down way of thinking and looking at the world. “Duchess’ father is a failed Shakespearean actor. He has great command of language and a Shakespearean view of the world. Those are two different archetypal upbringings in America — a New Yorker and a Midwestern scholar, and those are the two principal voices that would make the book.”
As Towles wrote the other characters, he realised that the reader needed to hear from them directly. “Having got well into the book I went back again bringing Woolly and Sally into the narrative, and eventually ended up with eight voices.”
Harmony not cacophony
Towles says he would not have done that if he had not been able to hear the eight voices strongly enough. “Mozart said, ‘if you have eight people talking at once and you can’t understand anything, it is cacophony. If eight people sing at once, even if there are different words, it can have a great, beautiful impact.’ In a narrative too, you try for complementary harmonies, so that the beauty, variety and tonality of the different singers come across as fine compositions and not chaos.”
Duchess and Emmett have the largest portions of the book, says Towles. “Emmett is the hero and Duchess the antihero. Woolly, Billy and Sally are satellites around those two.”
Not a researcher, Towles says he does not pick a topic, research it and then write a book. “What I do is pick a topic that is grounded in an arena I have a long-standing interest in. I have been a fan of the ‘30s since I was a kid. That is what I used as the foundation for inventing my version of New York in ‘38 in Rules of Civility. Same was the case with A Gentlemen in Moscow.”
The book cover
18 till I die
In the case of The Lincoln Highway, the research was relatively easy, says Towles. “When I was done with the first draft, I thought the characters in this story are 18. It is 1954, that is actually about the time my father would have been 18! My father died a few years ago, so you can interpret that as you will (laughs). While we are clearly shaped by the decade or so in which we come of age, the influence on us of the decade in which our parents came of age is almost as big.”
In 20th century American history, the ‘50s was a strange kind of an oasis, says Towles. “The ‘30s were defined by the Depression, immediately followed by the Second World War, which, like the Depression impacted the world. There is this incredible period of almost 20 years where the entire world is in a tunnel for these two back-to-back tectonic events.”
Rapidly melting pot
In ‘54, in the US, the soldiers returned home after the Korean War, went to college and decided to live in a different place, Towles says. “The economy is doing relatively well and the job market is great. The melting pot is melting very fast. Though New York, Boston and Chicago were multicultural cities, they were defined by the neighbourhoods. All that changed with the War. The Italian, Jewish and Irish kid went abroad and fought in the same unit. When they came home, they did not return to the old neighbourhood. They went to the suburbs or a new city.”
While the ‘60s were a turbulent time in the United States, the seeds for that turbulence were sown in mid 1950s, according to Towles. “You can put a pin for the Civil Rights movement in the spring of 1954 when the Supreme Court said in Brown versus Board of Education that ‘separate is not equal’.”
The teenage art form
Though Rock ‘n’ Roll is said to be soundtrack of the turbulent ‘60s and early 70s, Towles argues that Rock ‘n’ Roll was the cause of the rebellion. “Before Rock ‘n’ Roll, teenagers did not have their own art form. Teenagers in the 18th or 19th century did not have any means of expressing themselves. They basically lived their private teenager lives and whatever angst they went through, they did on their own. Rock ‘n’ Roll gave a platform for young people to articulate their views.”
It was a platform to talk of things they did not like whether it was religion, their parents’ lives, government institutions, sex or war, says Towles. “The sexual revolution was beginning in the mid-‘50s and then dominates the ‘60s and ‘70s. The mid-50s is an interesting moment where the quietude and economic prosperity after the War and Depression, has all this other stuff going on under the surface.”
Snapshots in time
Three movies — From Here to Eternity, The Wild One, and Shane, are mentioned in The Lincoln Highway. “Before the story begins, someone picks a fight with Emmett, he hits the kid, who falls back, hits his head and dies. Emmett is sent to a work farm. When he comes back to town, the family of the victim is angry. The dead boy’s brother confronts Emmett in the town square and wants to fight him. Emmett lets himself be beaten up without putting up a fight. Duchess watches without interfering because he thinks there is a great nobility and something manly in Emmett’s action.”
Towles says he had a notion that Duchess grew up watching movies. “He would compare this honourable beating to the beatings in these three movies he has seen— a Western, set in the 1850s, Shane (1953), a WWII film, From Here to Eternity (1953) and The Wild One (1953) about a motorcycle club.”
Juvenile delinquency in the United States was reinvented during WWII, according to Towles. “These kids grew up with their fathers fighting the War while the mothers were working in factories. They came of age, not through parenting but through gangs, not violent gangs, necessarily, but groups of unruly young men who felt ‘nobody tells us what to do’.”
At the crossroads
The book is more of a journey book than a road book, says Towles. “The book is less about what happens on the road and more about what happens at the junctions. One of the famous idioms in American blues music is crossroads. In mythology, you meet the devil at crossroads. The road can be various things—it could be the journey out, the journey home, the crossroads where a fateful thing occurs. A road can be different things and it is one of the reasons it is attractive as a metaphor.”
The web series based on A Gentleman in Moscow with Kenneth Branagh starring continues to be in development, Towles says. “The goal is to shoot next summer.”
