Life is a perspective. Actually, many. As many people as there are people are part of that finite story that exists. This is the basic premise from which American writer Amor Towles’ (Boston, Massachusetts, 1964) new novel The Lincoln Highway (Salamandra) begins, the protagonist of this chronicle and one of the main characters of contemporary Anglo-Saxon literature.
Our meeting takes place at her apartment in Gramercy Park, an upscale residential neighborhood between Union Square, the Flatiron District, and the East Village. New York is a city of contrasts, anyone who’s been there knows it, but it’s more evident in that area. A few blocks from these quiet, tree-lined sandstone streets, no one can tell the crowds are overwhelming, the noise deafening, and filth piling up around every corner. But that’s how it is.
“Manhattan is boiling again. Although office buildings in Midtown are still half-empty, many people are still telecommuting, restaurants in SoHo and Downtown are full, students are back, and tourists are already everywhere. This is how Towles sums up the trail of the pandemic in the Big Apple. He does this while sitting in the backyard of his apartment, listening to very soft jazz from a neighbor’s garden not far away that has become the impromptu soundtrack of the conversation. We left behind a certain luxury, not a pretentious one, in the interior. Towles’ taste in art, furniture and decoration, attention to detail and expressive style are also exquisite. His is cosmopolitan prose. Like his life.
Success
Arrived late for literature. She published her first novel, Rules of Courtesy, in 2011. He wrote this in the little remaining time of his lucrative job in the financial world. It was an unexpected, beautiful, and sure success, but not by chance or luck. Towles realized he wanted to be a writer at a very early age, in elementary school, when he came to poet David McCord’s class one day. His first serious character was created for the Vineyard Gazette, a local newspaper in West Chop, north of the island of Martha’s Vineyard (Massachusetts), where he spent the summers of his childhood and adolescence. Residents and vacationers with pleasure read the columns of a person named Edward Dillon, not knowing that everything comes from the imagination of a twelve-year-old boy. The same person later fell into the hands of Harrison Salisbury, editor of The New York Times, who put a message in a bottle on a nearby beach, and as a result began to maintain a fluid correspondence.
The boy grew up and went through Stanford and Yale, at one of his seminars he met Peter Matthiessen, co-founder of The Paris Review, who was impressed by his talent. He became his mentor, encouraging him to write tirelessly, so Towles was disappointed when he decided to please his banker father, giving up his literary dream and pursuing finance. Fortunately, Matthiessen lived long enough to see the publishing success of his student, who quit his job and eventually focused on his literary career. Depicting a year in the life of a young woman in her twenties in New York in 1938, The Rules of Courtesy was an international bestseller. Just Like A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) is his second novel starring a Russian aristocrat who is condemned by the Bolsheviks to be locked up in the legendary Metropol hotel.
Transport
On the Lincoln Highway (Salamandra), one of the highlights of the rental, which arrived in Spanish bookstores on Wednesday, Towles travels to another time and place in recent history: the 1954 United States. because, as stated at the beginning of these lines, there are eight different voices in the book responsible for telling the story of a group of children traveling on the highway that gives the book its name. a fund from youth to adulthood. “One of the main themes of the novel is what it means to be 18 years old. A moment when you start questioning everything your family, the church, the school, the books you read, everything you believe to be true and everything that shapes you the way you are. You realize that you don’t have to accept any of this, you can define it yourself,” says Towles.
The heroes of the book mature, just like the parents of the author. As he knew in the first twenty-four hours that the story would take place in ten days, a temporary and environmental election that was “immediately” evident would begin in the Midwest (Nebraska) and end in New York. . “In the mid-1950s, the United States was like a teenager, the country was full of youth, full of energy, and basically at the top of the world as an economic power, because Europe was still in World War II. The middle class was an invention of that time. Neighborhoods were formed. It was a moment of great promise, but the same At that time, the racial situation was horrendous, it was an age of discrimination… And that turbulent decade of the sixties was about to begin with the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, feminism… All these tremendous changes that took place between 1954 and 1964 determined the next fifty years. It was a very interesting time to tell because everything was just beginning.
He had never heard of the Lincoln Highway when he started writing the novel. Found it on a map. He didn’t have to resort to invention, as he did with the fictional region Yoknapatawpha, where many of Faulkner’s books take place. “Most Americans don’t know about the Lincoln Highway. It was the first highway to cross the United States. Later, the Government started to create road systems. You can still find it, there are signs that take you there and you can actually cross the country by following it. But way too small by modern standards. The almost ghostly, symbolic, atmospheric presence in Towles’ story makes the novel part of the entire American literary tradition that ties the author directly to Jack Kerouac. “The highway is a very important thing in American culture, partly because of the country’s expansion, because of its size. Every teenager in America will sooner or later go from New York to California or from California to New York, as Kerouac describes in On the Road. But there are so many stories on the road… We can go as far as Don Quixote and The Canterbury Tales, one of the first road books ever written.” But as the author warns, the journey comes before the road in the history of writing. There is Homer’s Odyssey (Lincoln One of the characters in Highway is named Ulysses, like the hero returning to Ithaca). “Central to western storytelling is how the individual changes. The individual progresses over time and we see how he reacts, how he develops, the results of his actions, how he becomes a better or worse person. This is the heart of the art of storytelling in Western culture. And if the center of the narrative is how the individual develops, it is natural to describe it through a journey, for the journey is a physical representation of this inner process.
Despite the importance of history in all his novels, Towles does not see himself as a historical novelist and does not like to be described as such. She explains this with a vehemence that is absent in the rest of the talk. “I don’t write historical novels. For me, History is the background to telling a story, it’s an approach to making places, times or moods make sense. But that’s not what I’m interested in, or what my readers should be concerned with.” His area of interest is interactions between people. “I think one of the reasons I like to set novels at different times is that I’m not interested in writing plays at the time, so to speak. It would be very hard for me to say: I’m going to write a book at the right time about Trump, about covid, about #MeToo, or any other specific topic. I don’t trust that. »
Every new Towles novel should be different, it should sound different. The next one he is currently working on begins in Cairo in the 1940s and ends in New York in 1999. That’s all he can read. “I love change because it forces me to reinvent myself. But I’m still the same writer, with the same obsessions and the same style.