The World Still Loves (Yesterday’s) America

In a 2023 interview, the American author Amor Towles explained his literary approach as follows: “Certainly the ambition is to create a work that will resonate, that is open to all and will resonate with many as the goal.”

Resonate Towles has. Since 2011, following a two-decade career in finance, Towles has published three novels, all of them bestsellers. Translated into 30 languages, they have sold more than 6 million copies worldwide. They are novels marked, on the one hand, by the plot-driven coziness of genre fiction and on the other by the polished prose and psychological sophistication of “upmarket” literature, an industry category encompassing the growing number of novels that blur the line between commercial and literary fiction. Whether “upmarket” or “literary,” however, an author like Towles has something any editor with an eye on sales numbers would like to bottle.

Table for Two: Fictions, Amor Towles, Viking, 464 pp., $32, April 2024

What is it that resonates so widely?

Literary fiction proper in the United States today tends to be short on plot and long on the crises of the present, addressing topics such as climate change, social injustice, internet fatigue, or the alienation and insecurities of American capitalism. It is also a genre in crisis, more or less synonymous with “unsalable.”

Towles’s enveloping novels, by contrast, are notable portholes to historical intrigue, laced by the promise of wealth. His first novel, Rules of Civility (2011), is set in 1930s New York among the Upper East Side elite, replete with ritzy addresses on Central Park West and dinners at legendary locales such as the 21 Club, an exclusive Manhattan restaurant. The story follows two young female friends—one rich, one poor—as they compete for the affections of a fabulously wealthy banker who, in a neat reversal, turns out to be in need of a benefactor himself.

Towles’s second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), enters into the heart of the Bolshevik Revolution—but without ever leaving the premises of Moscow’s finest hotel, where the wealthy Count Rostov has been placed under house arrest after being stripped of his lands and title. (His daily indulgences in the hotel’s haute cuisine are financed by a seemingly endless stash of gold coins kept hidden away in a secret compartment.) A Showtime miniseries based on the novel begins streaming on Paramount+ this month.

Both of these early novels evidence a devoted storyteller with an admirable command of old-fashioned tricks; their plots are fueled by the tried-and-true pursuits of power and cash. Towles has said he incubates and outlines his novels for years before beginning a draft, and when he does, he dispatches his characters with Dickensian efficiency: A glancing interaction with a waiter turns out to be the first introduction of Count Rostov’s archnemesis; a chance meeting with a wealthy woman at the 21 Club foreshadows a wealthy banker’s undoing. In a Towles story, there are no extras. Every character earns her keep.

Yet Towles strives for such comparisons to 19th-century literature—and self-consciously so, through frequent appeals to the literary models of yore. The fate of protagonist Katey in Rules of Civility—who likes to take her lunch breaks in the park “in the company of my old friend, Charles Dickens”—hinges on the generosity of a hidden (and sordid) benefactor, just like Pip in Great Expectations. From the confines of his fabulous house arrest, Count Rostov confidently collapses all of literature between “Chekhov and Tolstoy,” authors who “set the bronze bookends on the mantelpiece of narrative.” “Henceforth,” he continues, “writers of fictions from wheresoever they hail, will place themselves on the continuum that begins with the one and ends with the other”—Towles presumably included.

Amor Towles in his home in Manhattan, New York City, on Aug. 30, 2016. Richard Perry/The New York Times via Redux

The invitation to comparison with bygone literary giants is extended, unflatteringly, to the point of distraction in Towles’s third novel, The Lincoln Highway (2021). The story follows four young men (two of them outlaws, two of them morally infallible) on a cross-country quest through the American golden era of the 1950s, propelled by the promise of reclaiming a lost fortune. The driving motivation is buttressed by a passage on American individualism from Ralph Waldo Emerson and leans even more heavily on frequent asides to Homer’s Odyssey, clueing the reader in to the theme of an epic homecoming. For good measure, Towles also drops an early reference to Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, taking care to note that the musketeers actually numbered four—just like the cast of The Lincoln Highway.

This persistent, and reverent, homage to the canon raises the question of just how well the literary blueprints of the past transfer to a wistful American present. It’s a question the author seems to share. As Count Rostov wonders from the static luxury of his house arrest, “Had not his fascination with the past begun to smell suspiciously of nostalgia?” “‘As I’ve said to you before,’” a Soviet officer in that same novel echoes, “‘we [Russians] and the Americans will lead the rest of this century because we are the only nations who have learned to brush the past aside instead of bowing before it.’” Towles’s novels, and their popular reception, are one data point among many suggesting that the pull of the past has since gained the edge over the lure of the future—at least in the realm of American cultural exports.

From music to film to literature, critics have noted a broader retrograde shift, citing hit singles charts (recall the recent frenzy over a 1985 release from Kate Bush) or Hollywood’s eternal return to superhero stories dating to the 1930s. The concern isn’t so much that today’s cultural output references the past as that it merely resurrects or recycles it. While critics are quick to claim that repetition bores, Towles’s 6 million copies sold (not to mention Marvel movies’ successive box office blowouts) suggests that audiences are, to the contrary, captivated. More worrying than boredom, maybe, is whether the limited engagement with the now collaborates with populist claims currently sweeping the West: The best years are behind us; we ought to bring those old paradigms back. The virtue of looking forward would seem to be fading from mind, among Americans and those drawn to the American cultural scene alike.

Society women call for their drivers as they leave a charity event hosted by the Central Park Conservancy Women’s Committee in New York City on May 4, 2011. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

The major benefit of the new stories’ sweep of the near-present is to clear space for a cautious irony, even social critique, evidencing a connection to how people act today. A newfound resistance to romanticization yields, in turn, a more irreverent and metafictional (as opposed to imitative) handling of the past and its canon. The story “I Will Survive,” for example, winks at the detective story template when an Upper East Side divorcée enlists her daughter, Nell, to spy on her new partner; it appears he’s been lying about a standing Saturday appointment at the squash courts. The narrator, Nell’s own husband, draws on his love of mystery novels to help her prepare: “For all my literary aspirations, I had not found the time to read Marcel Proust or Thomas Mann,” he explains. “But I had somehow found the time to read … the entire published works of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett twice.”

The tip of the hat to masters of the detective genre lends a knowing humor to Nell’s own amateur, outmoded investigations. Donning a baseball cap, sunglasses, and—despite being in possession of a cellphone—a tiny camera, she trails her stepfather to Central Park, where a passerby asks her if she’s playing “an extra from Law and Order.” The genre arc is poignantly upended when she discovers that, far from courting another woman, her stepfather has taken up with a gender-fluid, disco roller-skating troupe on Saturday afternoons. The crime turns out to be both more serious and emotionally complex than the suggested affair or Nell’s initial assumption of a repressed sexual identity. Presented with photo evidence of her husband’s “secret outing,” Nell’s mother instead finds “an image of unadulterated joy. A joy that not only existed in her absence, but seemed to require it.” Naturally, she’s crushed.

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In his historical novels, Towles’s reverence for the past often spills over into a reverence for traditional American values writ large, expressed through an overweening loyalty to his protagonists’ (not to mention his homeland’s) moral exceptionalism. After serving a jail sentence for a crime he did not commit, the blameless Emmett of The Lincoln Highway refuses to be drawn into an unfair fist fight; instead, he turns the other cheek. “The willingness to take a beating,” an admiring onlooker observes, “That’s how you can tell you’re dealing with a man of substance.” In Moscow, when a senior Communist Party official suggests that American movies of the 1930s were “unprecedented mechanisms of class repression” designed to “placate the entire working class,” the contemporary reader is reminded that the CIA funded Hollywood throughout the Cold War in order to convince people like Count Rostov of exactly the opposite. Indeed, in a flash of imported American patriotism, the Count (who is a big fan of Casablanca) wonders “if [the official] didn’t have his analysis upside down”:

Certainly, it seemed true that glittering musicals and slapstick comedies had flourished during the 1930s in America. But so too had jazz and skyscrapers. Were these also narcotics designed to put a restless nation to sleep? Or were they signs of a native spirit so irrepressible that even a Depression couldn’t squelch it?

The jaded Manhattanites of Towles’s near-present New York, on the other hand, are capable of more incisive, less propagandistic aphorisms, precisely because they are neither so admiring nor admirable themselves. In “The DiDomenico Fragment,” a property-rich and cash-poor art dealer named Percival tries to con his younger brother and 10-year-old nephew into selling the eponymous painting, in the hope of securing a lucrative commission for himself. As part of an elaborate plan to set up the sale, he sneaks into the Yale Club in Midtown, where he notes of a particularly insufferable alumnus that “No one is born pompous. To attain that state requires a certain amount of planning and effort.” The punchline gains second life by applying to pedantic Percival himself.

This is the world Towles knows, and certainly skewers, best: a near-present hemmed in by Central Park West, Ivy League degrees, season tickets to the “best seats in the house” at Carnegie Hall, and passive-aggressive feuds over affairs, purchasing power, and inheritance.

Later, after discovering that his nephew is inconveniently attached to the Renaissance painting he hopes to convince the family to sell, Percival complains, “[T]o make matters worse, [his parents] were of that generation which had set itself apart from thousands of years of human behavior by showing an interest in the opinions of their children.” This is the attraction of intelligent, flawed narrators—they are willing to point out what others are too polite to utter. It’s pertinent gossip about the human condition, Count Rostov might say, that makes writers like Tolstoy, Chekov, and Homer “timeless.”

If an overarching atmosphere of anachronism nevertheless hovers over the stories, it is due in part to the conservatism of the old-money milieu that populates them. At other moments, however, it’s the prose and the genre templates, not the characters, that seem frozen in time. The collection is bookended by two historical pieces, which together constitute Towles’s weakest writing, falling back on old habits in an otherwise refreshing collection.

Immigrants arrive at Ellis Island, New York, in the early 20th century. Bain News Service/via Getty Images

The first story, “The Line,” returns to Bolshevik Russia, where a Russian peasant of Gogolian witlessness (but named Pushkin) is, “like a character in a folktale,” so good-natured about waiting in line for sugar, bread, and emigration approval on behalf of busier comrades that he accidentally earns himself a visa to New York. It’s a clever conceit. The lighthearted, folktale pastiche, however, is soon interrupted by exhausted warnings against the well-known costs of Soviet communism. A former portrait artist to the Russian nobility, now condemned to sweep floors, emerges as an object of particular sympathy: “To possess such a gift and no longer be allowed to put it to use struck Pushkin as heartbreaking, and he could not help but ask if Litvinov felt some resentment.” The painter Litvinov’s response echoes the gallant resilience of a Count Rostov or Cary Grant: “‘I have lived under these circumstances for nine years, my friend,’” he says, brushing the question of bitterness aside. “‘That is a long time to give one’s life over to resentment.’”

It’s unclear what wisdom the contemporary reader has to gain from stoking the embers of ideological debates long grown cold. (For all his belligerent, land-grabbing claims to the territories of the former Soviet Union, not even Russian President Vladimir Putin has designs on reinstating Soviet economic models.) Or is it exactly this cheerful ideological clarity, reminiscent of the Hollywood classics Count Rostov so admires, that “resonates” with readers today?

Artists often draw inspiration from previous centuries or else use their art to revisit history’s injustices and mistakes. Any reader in the habit of opening the news over the past two decades, furthermore, can attest to the need for escapist delights. There’s a difference, however, between resurrection and renovation or between allusion and permanent anachronism. A loss of interest in the stories of the present—or in stitching historical narratives into the now—points to a shift in both readers and writers’ understanding of American potential.

It’s tempting to pin the throwback turn on the internet and other technologies resistant to narrative. It seems just as likely, however, that when it comes to American literary fiction, audiences and authors alike have decided that the past simply makes for better stories. In 2001, just before 9/11, the meteoric literary breakout was Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, a hyper-contemporary portrait of an American family that instantly launched him to international bestseller status; published in September, many critics even heralded it as a prescient diagnosis of post-9/11 malaise. The representative American literary phenomenon of the following decade, by contrast, was Anthony Doerr’s 2014 All the Light We Cannot See, a tale of good versus evil starring two child savants in occupied Paris during World War II. Like Towles and Doerr, Franzen, too, has since turned to the past; his most recent novel, Crossroads (2022), is set in the American Midwest of the 1970s.

All of these recent books, Towles’s included, are deeply engrossing works of character-driven realism, their plots directed by strong moral and ideological compasses. (In Franzen’s work, the needle vacillates the most and so sweeps the broadest range of human behavior.) They are also historical. It’s as if the moral urgency of present crises resists the gripping, market-friendly plots that American authors are known for. In the post-9/11, post-financial crisis decades, those in the business of proffering—and consuming—deeply engrossing narratives of an exportable American vintage are forced to look back to a sepia-toned era.

Is it that the current American moment lacks a certain confidence?

The Carthay Circle Theatre hosts the premiere of Captains Courageous in Los Angeles, circa 1937.Bettman Archive/via Getty Images

The novella, by contrast, is filtered through a rosier lens. At a roadside Hollywood cafe, the titular protagonist, who works for a major studio, revels in the pluralistic promise of the American experiment: “Why, at that very moment, a pair of sleeveless Oklahomans fresh off an oil rig were sipping their coffees beside a banker in a pin-striped suit. … Denizens and drifters. The fabulous and the fallen. It simply livened the spirits to see so many different kinds of people gathered in one spot for a shared devotion that cost a nickel.” (The contemporary reader can’t help but notice that this summary glosses the question of racial segregation that would have also defined the crowd at the time.)

The story picks up a year or two after a major car crash in Rules of Civility, when the damaged Eve, with scarred face and permanent limp, has broken off her engagement to a wealthy banker. On a whim, she catches the train to Hollywood, where she comes to the aid of a film star being blackmailed with salacious pictures of her naked on a sofa—taken, of course, without her knowledge. (The star’s reputation is “white as [her] skin. Which is to say as white as snow. White as ivory. White as a pitcher of cream.”) Hired as an assistant by a studio executive, Eve suddenly finds herself responsible for protecting the star’s hitherto sterling reputation. The job mires her in a blackmail plot worthy of Hitchcockian antics but which, in its improbable and murderous turns, chooses instead to lean on allusions to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, including a poisoning scene.

Unlike Hamlet, Eve plays it cool; she emerges unequivocally triumphant, having reclaimed the photographic negatives and “exceeded [the studio exec’s] every expectation. She had exceeded them in terms of her shrewdness, her discretion, and her readiness to act, yes, but especially in terms of her flair.” The moral of the story, which proceeds in the cliche-riddled prose of a hard-boiled detective novel, celebrates the can-do attitude of underdogs (a timid starlet; Eve with her scar and limp; a has-been detective pushed out of the police force) who find the strength to seize the moment. It is an American moral with little to gain from the forced comparison to Shakespeare’s tortured pronouncement on action and inaction: “To be, or not to be?”

“Eve in Hollywood,” like Table for Two as a whole, is at its strongest when it cleaves to what Hollywood, in its golden era, also did best: fabulous poolsides, fancy hotels, beautiful women, and the American hustle, defined by “the extraordinary velocity with which money moved and the circular route on which it traveled.” It’s to this, the enduring charm of midcentury Hollywood—as opposed to 19th-century novels, the ideological battles of the Cold War, or Shakespeare—that Towles’s fiction is indebted. He is a gifted storyteller, successfully conjuring the escapism of the beloved classics he so often invokes.

But so far, he is ultimately an imitative one. Reading his body of work, I was reminded that the resilience and ideological confidence that so recommend his protagonists—unflappably bootstrapping and individualist, even when they are Russian aristocrats—are well suited to a hero like Grant, whose on-set crises are acute, abrupt, and thrillingly short-lived. It is less transferrable to the slow-burn challenges of an updated American present in need of new heroes, new models. In neglecting the novel’s capacity to metabolize—rather than reflect—the past, it is ironic that Towles’s patriotic fiction likewise neglects what is arguably the novel’s most American quality: the capacity to reinvent itself. Something tells me it’s this quality that America’s admirers are most in need of celebrating today.