Rules of Civility is a contest between Washington and Thoreau. Washington recorded a set of ‘rules of civility’, and one of the characters (“Tinker”) tries to follow them. They have to do with how to treat other people. If they were your only rules, you’d be very formal. You’d know how to do things; but if you wanted to know what to do or why, Washington doesn’t give much help.

(I’m sure Washington’s writings give that help elsewhere. But not the Rules of Civility.)

The other book of advice is Walden. Self-reliance, nature, reading, solitude, et cetera. This is the guiding star of the protagonist and narrator. The novel tells the story of a year in her life when she was friends with Tinker, who followed the Washington star.

It’s nice when the author telegraphs what moral codes the novel is about. Yes, it’s a morality play. Here are the choices before you: Rules of Civility versus Walden. Here’s how a character living the Walden life looks. Here’s how a character living the Rules of Civility life looks. Here’s how they interact. Here’s the end result.

This, to me, is one of the strengths of the novel form. The reader dwells long and closely with the characters, and, in a way, lives their lives from within. So the moral choices feel like real moral choices in a way that’s hard for a poem or a movie to achieve. (Those forms have their own strengths, of course.) This kind of novel is like an Aesop fable if you were able to spend four or five hours feeling what it’s like to be the fox. Or whatever animal.

Otherwise, the novel is a pretty straightforward love song to New York. Why are there so many novels set in New York in which the characters spend all day thinking about New York? New York may have some sort of faerie glamour spell on it that makes people write these novels.

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A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is a real treat. Everything about it is delightful and nothing is unpleasant or uninteresting. And there are a few moments of genuine, auroral beauty. Like the scene on the roof with the bees bringing apple-scented honey. Or the bouillabaisse feast.

A gentleman is someone who makes things easy for other people. In that respect, the narrator is as gentlemanly as the protagonist. I mean that this is a novel which is very deliberate about making itself easy to read. Nothing is ever desperate or panicked. The narrative treats a man’s suicide with the same delicacy and tact as a nation’s.

The way the convulsions of the first decades of Communism penetrate the story are gentle. Labels cut off wine bottles. One little girl left in a hotel. A group of idealistic young officials leaving for the countryside. It doesn’t take much historical knowledge to see the purge, the gulag, the Holodomor floating just beneath the surface.

It’s not more terrifying than One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But it might be more chilling.

I have a soft spot for exiled Russian aristocrats because of Nabokov. Speak, Memory is one of the great books of all time. But don’t worry! A Gentleman in Moscow couldn’t be further from a Nabokov book. Nabokov might have found it too sentimental, or unclever. But I aspire to be broad enough to love Nabokov for his cleverness and Fowles for his sentimentality.

The creative writing lesson in A Gentleman In Moscow is this: render the concrete. Take the things in the world and put them on the page. This is a novel anchored by food, painting, music, food, clothes, wine, architecture and food. You hook your readers by putting them in the world. And you put them in the world by putting the world on the page.

A good novel can be like time travel. I don’t know of any better way to get into a luxury hotel in 1920s Moscow.



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