★★★★☆ | Literary Fiction | Digital | Borrow | StoryGraph | Goodreads
My third book by Amor Towles who is an inspiration to me. He published his first novel, The Rules of Civility, at 47 after spending a career in investment banking in New York. Imagine that!
This one has some dear characters: Emmett, Duchess, Billy, Wooley, Sally, and a few other incidentals thrown in. Duchess is a borderline psychopath that I came to adore by looking at his situation through his own perspective.
Billy, the savant Sheldon Cooper-like character, serves a meta role as the story’s essential observer — a Xenos — and the story follows the pattern established in the book of hero journeys that Billy has read 25 times and carries with him everywhere.
One puzzle is the chapter numbers. They run down from ten to one by the book’s end. In the story, Emmett promises his little brother than when he gets angry (his fatal hero’s flaw), he will pause and count to ten before acting. I think the chapter count down is a hat-tip to that.
Highlights
When the man of the house is a drunk, you can tell. You can tell from the look of the furniture and the look of the front yard. You can tell from the look on the faces of the kids.
For what is kindness but the performance of an act that is both beneficial to another and unrequired?
Homer began his story in medias res, which means in the middle of the thing. He began in the ninth year of the war with the hero, Achilles, nursing his anger in his tent. And ever since then, this is the way that many of the greatest adventure stories have been told.
There is nothing more enthusiastic than sunshine, he said to himself. And no one more reliable than grass.
he understood why the people of New York walked with that purposeful urgency. It was a dissuasive signal to the vagrants and drifters and the rest of the fallen.
If I learned anything in the war, it’s that the point of utter abandonment—that moment at which you realize no one will be coming to your aid, not even your Maker—is the very moment in which you may discover the strength required to carry on.
Questions can be so tricky, he said, like forks in the road. You can be having such a nice conversation and someone will raise a question, and the next thing you know you’re headed off in a whole new direction. In all probability, this new road will lead you to places that are perfectly agreeable, but sometimes you just want to go in the direction you were already headed.
It is one of the most basic principles of infinity that it must, by definition, encompass not only one of everything, but everything’s duplicate, as well as its triplicate. In fact, to imagine that there are additional versions of ourselves scattered across human history is substantially less outlandish than to imagine that there are none.
Wouldn’t it have been wonderful, thought Woolly, if everybody’s life was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then no one person’s life would ever be an inconvenience to anyone else’s. It would just fit snugly in its very own, specially designed spot, and in so doing, would enable the whole intricate picture to become complete.
they shook hands with the silent affection of the kindred.
Xenos is a word from ancient Greek that means foreigner and stranger, guest and friend. Or more simply, the Other. As Professor Abernathe says: Xenos is the one on the periphery in the unassuming garb whom you hardly notice. Throughout history, he has appeared in many guises: as a watchman or attendant, a messenger or page, a shopkeeper, waiter, or vagabond. Though usually unnamed, for the most part unknown, and too often forgotten, Xenos always shows up at just the right time in just the right place in order to play his essential role in the course of events.