A Gentleman in Moscow

There’s an obvious reason a book about a man confined to one building for decades appealed to me up here, and I’ll admit the comparison crossed my mind more than once, though a fourteen-by-fourteen cabin on a mountain isn’t much like the Hotel Metropol. Count Alexander Rostov gets sentenced by a Bolshevik tribunal in 1922 to spend the rest of his life inside the hotel, on pain of execution if he steps outside, and the book follows him from a grand suite down to a converted attic room and then through decades of Soviet history happening mostly offstage while Rostov tends bar, befriends a headwaiter, adopts a nine-year-old girl who wanders in with a passkey and an appetite for secrets.

Towles writes with a lightness that’s the book’s main appeal and also, for me, its limit. The sentences are elegant, a little arch, fond of a well-turned aphorism about wine or friendship or the proper way to peel an apple in one strip. It’s genuinely funny in places and Rostov is good company, the kind of narrator who makes confinement look like a matter of temperament rather than circumstance. That’s a real accomplishment and I don’t want to undersell it.

But thirty years pass in this hotel and I never quite felt Stalin’s Russia pressing on it the way I wanted to. Show trials and famine and purges happen in the newspapers Rostov reads or in a friend’s disappearance mentioned a chapter later, at a remove that kept the book pleasant when I think it wanted, at least sometimes, to be more than pleasant. Up here the weather is the whole story some days, a front moving in changes everything about what I’m watching for, and I found myself wanting Towles to let the history do that same kind of work on his characters instead of mostly staying backdrop.

The plot mechanics in the last hundred pages, once the book decides to become a bit of a caper, are clever and satisfying on their own terms, and the ending lands better than I expected given how meandering the middle stretch gets.

It’s a good book for a slow week, easy to pick up and put down, warm without being saccharine. I liked it. I didn’t love it the way I loved some of the harder books on this list, and I think that’s a fair trade Towles made on purpose. Doesn’t mean I have to rate it like I don’t notice.