Presumably, one factor is that each city has its own romantic season. The very question that the song asks of us about autumn, we could ask ourselves of the song: Why does it seem so inviting? Within twenty-five, there would be interpretations of the interpretations by Chet Baker, Sonny Stitt, Frank Sinatra, Bud Powell, and Oscar Peterson. Within fifteen years of its first being played, Charlie Parker, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald had all explored its sentimental bounds. Written by a Belarussian immigrant named Vernon Duke, “Autumn in New York” practically debuted as a jazz standard. This is a very long excerpt for a review, but I’ve repeated it for a reason - if it strikes a chord with you, I’m pretty certain you’ll like Rules of Civility and, if it doesn’t, you might want to move on to something else immediately: I was already making those comparisons when I came upon the following passage on page 206 of Towles novel. Towles’ New York is not the gritty, steamy one of Philip Roth or Martin Amis (in Money) - it is much more the society New York of Edith Wharton, perhaps closest of all to the New York of Truman Capote in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Answered Prayers. Rules of Civility, his first book, does deserve a place in the ranks of “New York novels”, however - and for this reader, a prominent one. He was born and raised just outside Boston, graduated from Yale and Stanford and is the principal in a Manhattan investment firm - no Iowa cornfields in that CV.

I’m partial to those novels - there’s nothing better for a cold winter day than settling in with a book that brings back to life the locale of past vacations or explorations, even if the timing of the book is decades before my visits.Īuthor Amor Towles doesn’t quite fit that model completely.

And many of those writers who become successful choose to write an homage that attempts to capture their version of city of their dreams.įor readers who have had the chance to visit those cities, however infrequently, that means there is a body of literature, set across the decades if not centuries, that portrays the London or New York or Paris that we know only from our travels. Purchased at Indigo.caThere are a few cities in the world - London, Paris and New York come readily to mind - that serve as never-waning magnets in their power to attract certain types of aspiring writers who grew up in the hinterlands, be those hinterlands the Prairies of Canada, cornfields of Iowa or dales of Yorkshire.

Rules of civility review