Rules of Civility
Rules of Civility
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Amor Towles on Rules of Civility
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A hidden camera and fifteen years of waitingThe novel’s opening scene had been sitting in Towles’s imagination for roughly fifteen years before he wrote a word of it. In the early 1990s, he stumbled across a photography book he hadn’t sought out, and a single fanciful question arrived fully formed.
While I began writing Rules of Civility in 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s, when I happened upon a copy of ‘Many Are Called,’ the collection of portraits that Walker Evans took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera... I had the fanciful notion of someone at the exhibit’s opening recognizing the same person in two of the portraits.
The incubation period was long partly because Towles wasn’t treating the era as material to be researched but as something already absorbed. He’d spent years with the music, films, novels, and manifestos of the period before he ever outlined a chapter, and he drew a clear distinction between that kind of fluency and applied study.
I knew New York in the 1930s. I can often hear the research when I read a book that feels like it’s the product of something that was studied yesterday. It’s not seen in its fullest and simplest form, in the way a child sees it. You want to have the eyes of the child seeing in fiction.
A more personal inheritance also fed the book’s premise. His maternal grandmother lived into her late nineties and spent summers across the street from him, and their lunches together gave him something no archive could supply: a firsthand account of what it felt like to be young and unattached between the wars.
My grandmother, who was simultaneously a woman of manners and verve, fended off marriage proposals until she was thirty because she was having too much fun to settle down. Like the book’s narrator, she pushed a rival in furs to drink before ultimately accepting my grandfather’s proposal.
The book’s central question, whether a single chance encounter in your twenties can redirect the following thirty years, came directly from his own arrival in New York. In 1989, a Yale fellowship to teach in China was cancelled after Tiananmen Square, and he landed in the city almost by accident, sleeping in a roommate’s spare bedroom and walking into a party his first night there.
In retrospect, a number of careers and marriages sprang from the intersection of social circles at that party — but we certainly didn’t realize the importance of the encounters at the time. We were just meeting for drinks, making haphazard alliances and cursory decisions, shaping our futures unwittingly.
That party became the template for the novel’s inciting evening, and the accidental quality of it, the way futures assembled themselves from nothing in particular, became the book’s animating argument.
How he wrote it
One year, one voice, four hours a weekThe discipline behind Rules of Civility was a direct correction to the seven years Towles had spent on an unpublished novel set in Stalinist Russia, a project with five points of view and a loose outline that left him disoriented every time he sat down. He came away from that experience with a deadline he set for himself, and a fear of what missing it would cost him.
I had the mindset that if I didn’t have a novel that I felt good about by the time I was 50, that I would end up very bitter and a big drinker. So I wrote Rules of Civility while on the job and then retired as I started A Gentleman in Moscow.
The new book’s architecture was locked before he typed a sentence. He started on a date with deliberate symbolic weight and built the entire year’s work around a structural constraint that the calendar imposed.
So in launching a new book, I decided it would be a distinctive first person narrative; all events and characters would be carefully imagined in advance; and it would be written in one year. After a few weeks of preparation, I started Rules of Civility on January 1, 2006, and wrapped it up 365 days later. The book was designed with twenty-six chapters, because there are fifty-two weeks in the year and I allotted myself two weeks to draft, revise and bank each chapter.
With a full-time job and two young children at home, the four hours of actual writing he could carve out each week arrived only on weekends, split with his wife in shifts. The weekday commute became the real drafting table, where he worked through each scene in his head before he ever touched a keyboard.
I revised Rules of Civility from beginning to end three times in three years. All of that revision work was driven by the goal of economy.
Three complete passes over three years, all aimed at compression, meant that the prose readers encounter is a distillation of something considerably larger. The density of the sentences is the residue of that work.
The book’s title arrived mid-draft, not by design. He’d planned Tinker as a student of the American revolutionary period but hadn’t settled on the specifics until a book he already owned happened to fall open at the right page. George Washington’s ‘Rules of Civility,’ a list of 110 maxims the future president copied out as a schoolboy, turned out to crystallize everything the novel was already doing.
I happened to pull a collection of Washington’s writings off my shelf, which led off with his ‘Rules of Civility’ — and I knew right away that the ‘Rules’ should be the primary thing that Tinker had studied. My book investigates social stratification & manners, character & appearance, ideals & compromise — and Washington’s youthful list somehow seems at the heart of the whole crazy matter.
The personal thread
The narrator he could never have beenTowles chose a narrator separated from him by gender, class, ethnicity, and decade: Katey Kontent, daughter of Russian immigrants, working-class, in her mid-twenties in 1938. The distance was deliberate. He had come to believe that writing from inside his own experience would flatten rather than sharpen his attention.
I prefer to put myself in an environment that’s further afield and look through the eyes of someone who differs from me in age, ethnicity, gender, and/or social class. I think a little displacement makes me a sharper observer.
The grandmother who had talked to him over lunch about her youth between the wars gave him something he couldn’t get from any other source: evidence that the era’s sense of possibility was real, not a literary construction. Her life ran close enough to Katey’s circumstances, and diverged in ways specific enough, that he could borrow from it without copying it.
My grandmother, who was simultaneously a woman of manners and verve, fended off marriage proposals until she was thirty because she was having too much fun to settle down. Like the book’s narrator, she pushed a rival in furs to drink before ultimately accepting my grandfather’s proposal.
What he wants us to sit with
Good choices, crystallized lossThe book’s central argument is not that chance encounters are romantic or that they lead to happy outcomes. It is that they are structural, that the architecture of a life is built on moments nobody recognized as consequential while they were happening. Towles stated this as plainly as possible when pressed on the novel’s theme.
Certainly a central theme of the book is the degree to which chance encounters are the foundation for your long-term experience in life. [paraphrased from audio]
The epilogue refuses consolation. Katey arrives at a recognition about her best decisions that runs counter to the way people usually talk about good choices, and Towles treats this as the moral center of the whole book. He suggests in his reading guide that this passage is best saved for the end of the evening, when there’s nothing left to do but sit with it.
The main character observes at the end of the book that as we look back, it’s our best decisions, the making of our best choices, that through which life crystallizes loss... this shouldn’t lead one to despair, but it is just a reality of life. Life is bittersweet in that way. [paraphrased from audio]
New York in 1938 is not just a backdrop Towles found convenient. He sees the city as the specific mechanism that makes the story’s logic possible: a place where radical differences in background and ambition are compressed into the same diners, the same bars, the same subway cars.
Every year, young people from all over the world with very different backgrounds, interests, and ambitions descend on the city. This just increases the odds that the person you sit next to at a diner could change your life in very unexpected ways.