His opponent had fallen against a kerb and died, and Emmett was shipped off to a juvenile reform programme on a farm in Kansas. He has been released on compassionate grounds after serving a little over a year for hitting a boy who mocked his sickly father.
The novel opens in 1954 as the 18-year-old Emmett Watson is being driven through the midwestern emptiness by a prison warden. That I enjoyed it despite myself is a tribute to Towles’s near-magical gift for storytelling, his ability to construct a cast of characters at once flawed, lovable and fascinating. Perhaps understandably, I picked up his third novel, The Lincoln Highway, with a hint of bad faith. That novel sold by the bucketload – his first two books have now racked up more than 4m global sales, have been translated into 30 languages, and enable Towles to list his hobbies as “collecting fine art and antiquities”. An investment banker whose debut novel, The Rules of Civility, was released in 2011 to rave reviews and stupendous sales, Towles quit his well-paid day job and settled down to write an even bigger hit, 2016’s A Gentleman in Moscow, inspired by “his experience of staying at luxury hotels”.
I t would be easy to be riled by the idea of Amor Towles.
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