Amor Towles, Part I, Studying Amor Towles

In three novels, Amor Towles has established himself as a storyteller of remarkable skill and breadth. His most recent work, The Lincoln Highway, is a big-hearted cross-country trip full of comedy, adventure, and sometimes wisdom. The the pacing is so strong, you find yourself hating to see it over in the last few pages. 

Lincoln Highway employs a shifting point of view, perhaps the most dangerous thing a novelist can attempt, dangerous because to the novice it looks so temptingly easy. "If I run out of steam on one character," you tell yourself, "I'll just switch to another." Many and many a would-be Faulkner, however, has run aground, unable to keep the character's voices in balance while moving the narrative forward. More often than not, a garrulous loud-mouth of a secondary character, stages a mutiny and capsizes the whole thing before it leaves the dock. 

We're going to look at how Towles uses first-person and close third-person points of view to characterize Duchess and Woolly. The art to characterization, as all other aspects of the writing craft, is leave the reader something to do. The reader must be able to infer more about the character than is revealed on the page, and in the case of first-person narration, more than the character knows about himself.

Duchess is a charming snake -- likeable and charismatic as he is dangerous and unpredictable -- with a sense of retributive justice almost admirable in its impartiality. What makes entering the consciousness of a character like this so tricky is the risk of sacrificing all the charm and leaving nothing but the snakiness, or vice-versa. And yet Duchess is perhaps the richest and best developed character in the novel. You love him, you just wouldn't want to know him.

In this passage, having escaped a youth detention center, he searches someone's house hoping to find a bottle of booze.

... the drawers were cluttered with all sorts of things that had no business being there, like an old alarm clock, a half deck of cards, and a scattering of nickels and dimes.

After scraping up the loose change (waste not, want not) I opened the bottom drawer with my fingers crossed, knowing it to be a classic stowing spot. But there was no room for a bottle in there, because the drawer was filled to the brim with mail.

It didn't take more than a glance to know what this mess was all about: unpaid bills. Bills from the power company and the phone company, and whoever else had been foolish enough to extend Mr. Watson credit. At the very bottom would be the original notices, then the reminders, while here at the top, the cancellations and threats of legal action. Some of those envelopes hadn't even been opened.

Amor Towles

I couldn't help but smile. 

There was something sort of sweet in how Mr. Watson kept this assortment in the bottom drawer -- not a foot away from the trash can. It had taken just as much effect to stuff the bills inside his desk as it would have to consign them to oblivion. Maybe he just couldn't bring himself to admit he was never going to pay them.

... Outside, I heard the wheels of Mr. Ransom's pickup turning into the Watson's drive. The headlights briefly swept the room from the right to the left as the truck passed the house and headed toward the barn. I closed the bottom drawer of the desk so the whole pile of notices could remain safe and sound until the final accounting.

Duchess' petty theft, "scraping up the loose change," is followed by unexpected lyricism as he reconstructs the story of a man's downfall by different strata of unpaid bills in the bottom drawer, the phrases themselves clumped like stacks of letters: "the original notices, then the reminders, while here at the top, the cancellations and threats of legal action." The last sentence expresses a kind of muted wonderment, "Some of the bills hadn't even been opened." And then, as if after a pause for thought, his reaction summed up in a five-word paragraph, "I couldn't help but smile."

For a nickel-and-dime thief he has quite a way with words. (His father, we later learn, was a failed Shakespearean actor.) Duchess is a cynic and an opportunist, but not just a cynic and opportunist. At the end of the passage, he closes the drawer, not -- he tells himself and the reader -- to avoid being caught rifling Mr. Watson's possessions -- but so that the unpaid bills could remain "safe and sound until the final accounting." The reader sees through the rationalization -- no first-person narrator is ever 100% reliable -- but it isn't just rationalization. The two contradictory elements of Duchess' character, his opportunism and romanticism, are captured in that one phrase. We see that Duchess is putting on an act to cover up the shabbiness of his behavior, but he does it with such flair and charm, and seeming sincerity, we can't help but be beguiled.

Duchess' companion, Woolly, as the name implies, is wooly-brained, something of a man-child. A foil for shrewd, smooth-talking Duchess, Woolly is disingenuous and naïve to the point of simplemindedness. 

Though generous in terms of length, Towles' novels are impressively efficient. Rarely is there a wasted motion. This passage, in which Woolly admires a Howard Johnson placemat with a street map of local attractions, simultaneously reinforces a sense of time and place with an artifact of bygone Americana, introduces a minor plot twist which unfolds in the following pages, and in a two sentences puts us fully into the character's head. 

Towles' notebooks while writing Lincoln Highway.
One with original title, Unfinished Business

It was just the way the pirates used to draw their treasure maps. They shrunk down the ocean and the islands until they were very small and simple, but then they added back a big ship off the coast, and a big palm tree on the beach, and a big rock formation on a hill that was in the shape of a skull and was exactly fifteen paces from the X that marked the spot.

Towles presents Woolly in third-person, rendering private thoughts with Free Indirect Discourse; that is, instead of a filter such as, "To Woolly the placemat seemed..." or "The placemat reminded Woolly of..." Woolly's impressions are presented directly, in Woolly's limited childlike vocabulary, "big ship... big palm tree... big rock formation." 

Both Woolly and Duchess have a romantic streak, but while from a drawerful of bills, Duchess visualizes the sad and lonely reality of a farmer's personal downfall, Woolly sees in a placemat a call to adventure. And while the images Duchess paints are always at least half self-serving, everything from Woolly is whole-hearted and sincere.

The paragraph has only two sentences, but as sure a sense of rhythm as in Duchess' passage. As if it were a treasure-map itself, the second sentence leads us past a series of landmarks unmistakable to anyone who's ever played pirate -- starting from the "big ship off the coast" we come to the beach indicated by a lone palm tree, then the rock formation "in the shape of a skull" and then the "fifteen paces" -- suspense building in us in spite of ourselves -- until in a series of one-syllable words, packed tightly together, winds up the sentence with lip-smacking emphasis: "the X that marked the spot."

Woolly and Duchess are designedly as different as can be, but in these passages Towles uses the same tools to depict each of them. First, a poet's intuitive grasp of word choice, structure, and rhythm. Then, a careful attention to the ordering of details -- the layers of bills in the desk drawer, the order of landmarks on the pirate map. And lastly, the character's perceptions of the world around him, perceptions which tell us more about himself than he realizes. We stand apart from the character and see him as he is unable to see himself, but at the same time are within the character, feeling what he feels, and are charmed into empathy.

Which is a lovely thing when it happens. 

Next month, using one of Towles' passages as a model, I'll try drafting an original scene.  Stay tuned. 

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