A GENTLEMAN FROM BOSTON IN BOSTON
Amor Towles, author of the best-selling Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow, and The Lincoln Highway as well as the newly published Table for Two, regaled an appreciative audience with anecdotes about his own life, his writing process, and a glimpse into the origins of one of the short stories in Table for Two at the Emerson Colonial last night as part of his latest book tour.
A born raconteur, Towles, who is originally from the Boston area, began by sharing a couple of anecdotes about his father’s quirky frugality, which included leasing a parking space between two dumpsters behind Boston’s nearly 200-year-old Union Oyster House for the decades of his career in banking. Towles’s engaging, wry, self-deprecating humor engaged as he shared some of the corrections and critical comments he had received from readers. For example, a woman who identified herself as a winner of the 1973 Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award criticized the dishwashing technique of a character in The Lincoln Highway. Another writer corrected Towles’s inclusion of a liquor store in that same novel. “There were no liquor stores in Ames, Iowa, in 1954,” she said, and went on to describe the lengths to which her parents, whom she described as “heavy drinkers” had to go to keep themselves supplied with alcoholic beverages.
Having warmed up the crowd, Amor went on to describe his writing process. He told us he had started writing fiction as a child and had continued through high school and college. Two of his former high school English teachers were in the audience, he said. Based on Towles’ description of their comments on his high school writing, they must have been amazed by his success, or perhaps they felt some pride in their success at encouraging his improvement.
Towles said ideas for a story or a novel generally come to him in the form of a single sentence. Once a sentence was lodged in his head — “A guy is trapped in a hotel for a long time”— the key elements of a story — other characters and major events — begin to accumulate. He would then spend the next three to five years filling notebooks with details about everything and everyone that had to appear in the novel. He would follow this process by creating an outline—typically of about 40 pages for a novel—and only then would he begin to write, a process that took another year or two.
Handsome and urbane, Towles is as personable as an ideal dinner companion. He freely admits shortcomings such as his lack of knowledge about wine, for example, despite the importance of wine to some of his plots. Even though he (obviously) does all the talking, at least until the Q-and-A section of the evening, his warm and inviting manner brings viewers into his world. When some of his stories seemed to wander a bit off track, he offered an amused acknowledgement of that and smoothly found his way back to his point. Such an admission made him seem only more endearing, as did his recognition of his own weaknesses — for example, his inability to appreciate an anticipated concert due his obsession with the person sitting beside him or his failure to recognize the emotional power of a scene in the film adaptation of A Gentleman in Moscow because he didn’t write it himself.
All in all, the evening is a rewarding and satisfying experience. It reminded me of a recent anecdote from a friend: After her husband finished reading A Gentleman in Moscow, he sighed with satisfaction and then turned back to page one to begin the experience again. I would have been quite happy after a sigh of satisfaction to turn around after exiting and repeat the experience of Towles’ ironic humor and winning observations.
photo by Dmitri Kasterine
An Evening with Amor Towles
Table for Two book and lecture tour
reviewed at Emerson Colonial in Boston on September 24, 2024
tour continues; for dates and cities, visit Towles