Rules of Civility

by Amor Towles

I took a sip of my martini. It was well diluted with the melted ice. You could barely taste the gin. It wasn’t going to be much help. —You look good, I said finally. Eve eyed me patiently. —Katey. You know I can’t stand that sort of crap. Especially from you. —I’m just saying that you look better than when I saw you last. —It’s the boys in the basement. Every day it’s bacon with breakfast and soup with lunch. Canapés with cocktails and cake with coffee. —I’m jealous. —Sure. The Prodigal Son and all that. But pretty soon you feel like you’re the fatted calf. With some difficulty she sat upright. She reached out two fingers and picked up a small white pill that was almost invisible on the surface of the table. —I’m gonna find me Jesus one of these days, she said, then she washed the medicine down with her tepid gin.

Quotation Marks: When I began writing RULES OF CIVILITY I was using traditional quotation marks, but after fifty pages, I scrapped them. Principally, I did so because they were bugging me. Quotation marks are designed to let an author insert parenthetical observations or characterizations in the middle of a spoken statement. By scrapping the quotation marks, I was generally forced to write conversation in such a way that the dialogue would do most of the work on its own. In addition, by dropping the quotation marks (and the opportunity to insert narrative commentary mid-speech), I felt the book would have more pace, and pace was something that I definitely wanted RULES OF CIVILITY to have. In GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW, I returned to using quotation marks because narrative interruptions and commentary seemed perfectly in keeping with the style of the Count’s thought process. But I scrapped them again in THE LINCOLN HIGHWAY, a novel centered on eighteen-year-old boys with a lot of forward momentum.