The interruption of our dinnertime conversations

New York 2015

A few chapters into the 2011 novel Rules of Civility, Amor Towles asks his lead character to begin reading:

I read twenty-five pages out loud. Eve fell asleep after ten. I suppose I could have stopped, but I was enjoying the book. Starting on page 104 made Hemingway’s prose even more energetic than usual. Without the early chapters, all the incidents became sketches and all the dialogue innuendo. Bit characters stood on equal footing with the central subjects and positively bludgeoned them with disinterested common sense. The protagonists didn’t fight back. They seemed relieved to be freed from the tyranny of their tale. It made me want to read all of Hemingway’s books this way.

Our narrator for this passage is Katey Kontent—an alliterative name that doesn’t exactly disguise its connotations. She’s our host throughout the novel, the character who takes us around late ’30s Manhattan, the perspective from which we view the action. In the paragraph above, however, are we observing Kontent or Towles? Who is the real fan of mid-novel Hemingway? Does Katey Kontent—a character born in 1913—relish the innuendo and disinterested common sense of sparse prose, or does Towles?

Novels often make use of novels, and it’s worthwhile to sit a tad straighter whenever an author references an author. A novel inside a novel shouldn’t be incidental, just as there’s nothing incidental about the props scattered around a theater stage. A murderer, to stretch the example, covers quite a wide spectrum of possible characters; once our murderer picks up an axe, however, we have a revealed a slightly more specific type of murderer. So when an object is abruptly thrust into any narrative, and ends up consuming a paragraph, it should be somehow revealing—primed to escalate at least one element in the story. Whether Towles does that here is a separate question, and would require more context from the novel.

Writers who indulge this temptation are guilty of interrupting a dinnertime conversation. Just a minute ago—on the previous page of the narrative—we had a great conversation going, full of verve and intrigue and potential, and nobody wanted our lively banter to end. Yet, without any warning, the author interrupts us from the end of the table, merely to raise a separate point, one quite unrelated to the discussion: about a political article they read, an opinion they just remembered, for a lengthy digression about an even lengthier theory. Because we’re at least reasonably polite, we follow along, and soon enough the conversation and the narrative returns to its old track, though we’ve now lost a bit of our rhythm. There are, in fact, plenty of political discussions at our table. We even entertain and enjoy notable theories and new ideas. Or we tell about recent experiences. What we avoid, however, are those childish interruptions, the look-right-here insertion of topics, unrelated to the discussion.

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