(The Old Town threw a 100th birthday party for its urinals last November, complete with a Champagne toast and a congratulatory letter from Mayor Bloomberg. Fanelli’s in SoHo, the 19th-century tavern turned art world hangout where he and his sister have a tradition of lunching after Christmas shopping, is still there, as is the Old Town Bar on East 18th Street, the old Tammany Hall redoubt where he and his wife ended up on their first date. Towles, who grew up outside Boston, says his own sentimental New York geography centers on the area between Houston and 20th Streets, where he has lived for most of his adult life, first in an illegal sublet on Third Street in the East Village (“next to the Hells Angels”) and then for 13 years at Bleecker and the Bowery, across from CBGB. It’s also a retro-imaginary Zagat’s guide of sorts, a loving evocation of the chance social alchemy of Village jazz joints, Wall Street coffee shops, Midtown Champagne palaces, and Lower East Side former speakeasies packed with radical émigrés, disputatious painters and slumming uptowners. There followed the most delightful few hours.“Rules of Civility” (reviewed on ) is a fizzy, finely observed tale of an ambitious young secretary from Brooklyn who falls in with a crowd of upper-class bright young things in late 1930s Manhattan. Sometimes you just have to give in to a book, even one of which you (slightly) disapprove. I remember thinking that even its author’s name – who is Amor Towles, if not a character in a Truman Capote short story? – came across as part of what we might call “the concept”.

Five years ago, I opened that book with a certain amount of reluctance: the work of a former banker with dandy-ish clothes and (or so I read) a covetable Manhattan townhouse, it seemed, outwardly, to be little more than a quite brazen attempt to mash up Sex and the City and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’d clean forgotten about Towles, whose first novel, Rules of Civility, came out in 2011. Should he step outside the Metropol’s door, he will be shot, and so, inside it he remains, for the next 32 years. It isn’t out here until February, but given that it has already been published in the US, I think it’s probably OK for me to say that it tells the story of one Count Alexander Rostov, an elegant Russian aristocrat who in 1922 is sentenced by a Bolshevik tribunal to house arrest in a luxury hotel. T he other day, my husband strolled into my office bearing major booty in the form of a proof of A Gentleman in Moscow, the new novel by Amor Towles.

Rules of civility review