By Oliver Orovitz
Gotham
320 pages
(Before enrolling at Harvard, Oliver Horovitz spent a year in Scotland, where he woke up at 4:30 a.m. during the summer to caddie at St. Andrews' famous Old Course.)
“There’s something about your arrival into St. Andrew’s. On the bus from Leuchars Station, the homecoming happens in stages. It begins with the outermost reaches of the St. Andrews Links, when farms and hay fields suddenly give way to the fifteenth tee of the Eden Course and you are instantly seeing locals striking with 5-irons. Excitement builds as you speed past the driving range and then the back side of the Old Course Hotel. And then suddenly you are clear of the hotel, beyond the playing fields, and boom, you are staring right down the eighteenth fairway, at the Royal and Ancient Clubhouse, and stately Hamilton Hall, and Swilcan Bridge, and the final sloping green, and there, in the very center of it all, are the caddies, leading golfers down the first fairway, on rounds much like rounds in the year 1520 … and when you see this, when you take it all in, it’s as if time has stood still since your last visit, as if life here has just rolled along unchanged inside a Scottish snow globe, untouched by the intervening period of dramas in your life and in the world. Just golf and divots and clouds and sky.”
