A Gentleman in Moscow. Amor Towles. 2016.
How easy is it, really, to write a book giving respect to people who believe things we don’t believe? And how easy is it to respect a book written by someone who clearly believes things we don’t believe?
I started this book with a chip on my shoulder, and liked it in spite of myself, but I still don’t entirely trust it. I don’t really trust most Americans to write about the USSR, let alone one who used to be an investment banker who was raised by other investment bankers. It’s not impossible for the job to be done well, but it’s an uphill struggle I think: like asking a fish to describe what it’s like to live on land. Liberal capitalism is hegemonic in the United States; so too is the conception of the USSR as a miserable, repressive failure. The life that Amor Towles is accustomed to would have been impossible there. Is it possible for him to see beyond that fact to what was possible?
Because liberal capitalism is hegemonic in America, I think American writers can fall prey to some cliches when writing about the USSR - and this may especially follow for writers who are especially locked into the capitalist system. They tend to portray anyone who actually believes in communism - because it was itself hegemonic where they were, or because they grew to believe in it after experience or study - as naive, brainwashed idiots at best. At worst communists are cynical liars, merely professing a belief. There are times when A Gentleman in Moscow threatens to fall into these cliches - a formerly innocent young girl becoming a true believer in the communist project as an adult is treated as a wasteful tragedy. An intellectual’s early belief in the revolution curdles into cynicism. No one is better off after the revolution.
And look, I’m not brainwashed either - I’m comfortable calling the USSR a failure. But people did believe in it; they weren’t all brainwashed and they weren’t all pretending either. It was an experiment, carried out by flawed people under brutally less-than-perfect circumstances. The problem with experimental states is that real people live under them, and die too - you don’t get a chance to test your ideology out in a lab before setting it up in the real world. But they were just people, like you or I: good people, evil people, naive people, predatory people, cynical people and idealistic people. They weren’t trying to create a dystopia, they were trying to do the opposite. And maybe they were wrong - it’s certainly possible, and you can’t deny that they failed and a lot of good people were killed in the process. But if you’re going to write about them with any credibility, you have to make the empathetic leap towards accepting that they really did believe what they claimed to believe.
I fear my own biases are coming through here. I am a socialist; I do not agree and will never agree that liberal capitalism is superior to communism. I have arrived at this position through much study and experience. Maybe Towles would consider me brainwashed or naive; I’d consider him so, from what I know of him and his background. Which leads me to a harder question: not whether I trust unabashed capitalists to write about communism, but do I trust myself to accurately evaluate art made by unabashed capitalists? Am I capable of evaluating this art fairly for what it is, free of ideology?
I mean, I hope so. There’s a lot of art I love that I find at the very least ideologically spotty, and when it comes to art I mostly hold to the Oscar Wilde (another socialist, albeit an unusual one) school: all art is quite useless, and the idea that art has to fulfill some ideological, social or market function is itself regressive and born out of capitalist ideology. In a true socialist utopia, we’ll be free to make art that serves no purpose other than beauty. Not all Marxists agree; certainly the Soviets did not. But I try not to look at things that way. If I only read books by communists, I wouldn’t be left with much anyway.
This novel is fun. I think that’s the right word for it; it’s got a lightness to it that’s catching. You can’t not like the main character, who is resilient and kind and funny in the right amounts. I think being confined to a waitstaff job in a hotel is more than the Russian aristocracy deserved and he should have considered himself a lucky beneficiary of socialist mercy, but that’s neither here nor there. He’s appealing. The story is suspenseful, propulsive, and readable. I think Amor Towles is a good writer, even for a capitalist running dog (sorry I can’t help it).
And I was relieved by the lightness; there are so many books about the USSR by Americans that are so dour and depressing that they may as well be propaganda even if they weren’t meant to be. People smiled under socialism. They fell in love, and had casual sex, and made art, and raised families. They were just people. Lots of them suffered, too much, but it wasn’t nothing but suffering. A Gentleman in Moscow strikes an okay balance here: things weren’t great, but there was hope. There always is, wherever people are.