Only last week I was on holiday: happily sitting in a café burrowing my way through the last few hundred pages of Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway when I noticed the German couple at the next table staring approvingly at its jacket. As I eventually made eye contact I knew what was coming.
‘Oh, did you read A Gentleman in Moscow?’ beamed one half of the couple.
‘We loved A Gentleman in Moscow!’ followed up his husband.
This is not the only time this has happened to me, nor the four million or so others who have had the pleasure of reading Amor Towles’ second novel: following the decades-long escapades of a Saint Petersburg-born count who is placed under house arrest in a Moscow hotel during the Bolshevik Revolution. Because while there are many books and bestsellers and Booker Prize-winning books, and bestselling Booker Prize-winning books, very few novels go on to become what their authors really dream of, which is… well, I’ll let Towles himself take over from here, being far better equipped than I.
‘I mean, a book can be a doorstop. It can be a way to pass time on a train,’ he says, sitting at his home about an hour outside New York. ‘But what you’re really hoping is that the effort of invention, the work of the imagination, will live on in conversation between friends and in the memories of a reader… and this, of course, is an extreme example of that outcome.’
By ‘this’, he means the fact that his most celebrated work is now to make its way on to screens: as a series on Showtime (Paramount Plus in the UK) starring Ewan McGregor. Towles is well aware that many great books have ended up being not-great films or TV shows — ‘You can have Tom Hanks starring and Spielberg directing and it can still end up being terrible’ — but he seems, to my great relief, quite thrilled with the outcome. I wonder how much input he had into how it has turned out?
‘Well,’ he says, smiling. ‘When I got the first draft of the pilot, I happened to be having lunch with my friend Michael Lewis. Michael wrote The Blind Side, and Moneyball, and The Big Short. He asked what was happening with A Gentleman in Moscow, and I said, “Oh, they actually just sent me the first draft of the pilot, and asked for my thoughts and my input. But, you know, I think they’re just being polite.” Michael pauses, and then just says, “They’re definitely just being polite. Not only do they not want to know your feedback. They wish you were dead.”’
As it turns out, he was fairly heavily involved in the selection of the writers, directors and the casting and so was happy to cede control. He spent a lot of time with McGregor discussing the count’s backstory that did not end up in the book — ‘I can’t think of a person who could do the count as well’ — and was staggered by the period detail on set. ‘When my first novel came out you couldn’t have gotten a star like Ewan McGregor to do long-form television. You couldn’t have gotten writers and directors of this calibre or the costume people, the set designers, or anybody. So to have a novel picked up and interpreted into visual medium in this era is particularly satisfying as a novelist.’
Towles’ own journey to becoming a novelist has been somewhat unorthodox. Born in Boston 60 or so years ago, he studied English at Yale and Stanford, but upon graduating ended up working on Wall Street for over two decades as an investment manager: his firm, Select Equity Group, was responsible for more than $18 billion in assets. His first novel, Rules of Civility, only came out in 2011, becoming enough of a success that he was able to quit and become a writer full time, with A Gentleman In Moscow arriving five years later. And because his direct email address is on his website — ‘Dickens would have killed for that!’ — he was able to see how viscerally it was connecting with people all over the world.
‘I had a young Korean soldier, saying, “I’m doing my military service and living in a barracks with three other men. I don’t want to be here and your book helped me survive basic training.” I’ve had a lot of people write to me from hospital. I had a guy who wrote to me and said, “I went on a date through Tinder or whatever, and we were both reading A Gentleman in Moscow. We spent the whole date talking about the book. We fell in love. We’re getting married. And so what I want to do is present the ring to her hidden in the pages of the book. Would you be offended if I cut out a hole in it?” I mean… the Count does the same thing in the book, so it’s perfectly appropriate! So he sent me the picture, he’s spent days cutting this hole for the ring and it’s like… holy moly.’
In a few weeks Towles’ collection of short stories, Table for Two, comes out, after which he will disappear to write his next long-form novel, involving a story that ‘begins in Cairo at the end of the Second World War and ends up in New York City in 1999.’ Before that, though, there is A Gentleman in Moscow the TV series. I have to say that before to speaking to him I was anticipating that the new show would be another in the never-ending series of crushingly disappointing adaptations of books I have loved dearly. But now? Well, I am as excited as he is.
‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ premieres 29 March on Paramount+
