Last week Out There was in the grand old house for a pre-publication party celebrating The New York Times bestselling author Amor Towles and his new novel "A Gentleman in Moscow" (Viking, releases on Sept. 6). Our cocktails ground zero was the French Parlor in the Palace Hotel, a party room overlooking the hotel's elegant Garden Court . The posh choice of venue was apt, as the gentleman of the book's title is a Russian aristocrat living under house arrest in Soviet-era Moscow, seeing out the rest of his days at the grand hotel Metropol.
Towles' novel is big and sprawling, perhaps self-consciously echoing the Golden Age of Russian literature - everything from Chekhov to Tolstoy - encompassing 30 years of Russian history as reflected in the life of the hotel. There, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov enjoys his days, dines, wines, and eventually serves guests, during a period from the Stalinist purges through to the Khrushchev Era. It's an impressive sweep, told handsomely through the Count's life, the advent of his maturity and paternity. We were happy to meet Towles, who earned his MA through the same program at Stanford that OT did.
And we were happy to hang in the luxurious digs of the French Parlor, a reception room on a terrace above the Garden Court. We feel a real history with this grand hotel as well, and with the GC, where we were first taken by our supervisor at The Recorder, where we had our first publishing job. The dear man loved taking the "proof-room boys" out to a glamorous lunch at one of the great old San Francisco places, which at that time in the 1980s were still alive and thriving: Ernie's, Enrico's, and not least the GC in the Palace.
But of course the Palace Hotel has always been bigger than just the Garden Court. We've had many a memorable rendezvous in the Pied Piper bar, where we thank Zeus that the Maxfield Parrish painting still hangs. In it, the PP is luring all the children of the village away to their certain doom because the town elders reneged on their exterminator bill. Parrish set the tale in a landscape he based on the red rocks of Sedona, AZ. A previous management had actually considering cashing in on the painting, selling it and replacing it with -- what? video Muzak? -- until a public outcry and various natterings of the press convinced them to keep it.
Back to the Metropol. Towles points out that 12 years after its opening, the grand hotel in Moscow was a literal bastion in the war between the Bolsheviks and the Tsar's forces. After the Revolution, renamed the Second House of the Soviets, it housed government bureaus and officials. But by 1922, the Metropol was restored to its splendors as luxe hotel, serving as an international crossroads of diplomats, spies, world travelers and Soviet officials, and as a watering hole for its press corps. Despite being right around the corner from the Kremlin, Towles notes, it became one of the classic hotels found in capital cities like the Ritz in Paris, or the Plaza in New York.
The Palace is right up there in their league, in our estimation. As it happens, the week before our visit there for the book launch party, the Palace was the subject of The New York Times' "Check In" column, in which a family of four checked in to check out their room, the general amenities and dining. With this last checkpoint they had to give credit to the Garden Court, "with its soaring stained glass ceiling and Italian marble columns, dominated by nice dangling pale pink Austrian crystal chandeliers. The only downside was the jarring disconnect between the room's fairy-tale elegance and the sloppy sartorial style of American tourists, in sweatsuits, basketball shorts, flip-flops and T-shirts." Oh well, at least the serious drinkers in the Pied Piper bar know how to dress when they're out in public and tying on a few.
"A Gentleman in Moscow" doesn't get reviews until its release in the fall, but we can say from reading an advance uncorrected copy that it's a big, fun read packing a lot into its 464 pages. Towles clearly cares about the novel's overall structure, something most readers don't pay overt attention to but all fiction writers do. For what it's worth, all of the words of all of the subchapter titles begin with the letter A. And the Count takes his place as an unforgettable fictive character who makes hay within the confines of a proscribed world.
P.S. Last weekend we attended the Northern Nevada Pride parade and celebration in Reno. It was great to cheer on our LGBT brothers and sisters outside the bubble of the Bay Area. Our rallying cry rang loud and clear: "Love trumps hate!"