“For me, it’s very much about this thread of language, and how it’s unfolding and referring to itself as it goes,” he says.With this snappy period piece, Towles resurrects the cinematic black-and-white Manhattan of the golden age of screwball comedy, gal-pal camaraderie and romantic mischief. It lets him get his bearings when he surfaces from wherever he goes to produce the sinuous, frequently charming prose that, like Towles, may be best described as cosmopolitan. The idea was “to try to capture the freshness of the imaginative moment, where it’s all sort of exciting and interesting and revealing itself,” he says. But recognizing that the best writing in it had been done in the first year, he engineered a fix: spend as long as necessary to outline a story, but just 12 months getting down the first draft. The chains were clanking outside the door.” After a decade, convinced that if he did not resume writing he would reach 50 “bitter and a drinker,” he found time over seven years to write a novel that he ultimately concluded was bad. While making his first fortune as a partner in a boutique investment firm, Towles would occasionally see Matthiessen. “So you should assume that at this moment, you have turned your back on writing for the rest of your life.” “The people I’ve seen go to Wall Street do not come back,” Towles remembers Matthiessen saying. So when Towles broke the news that to please his father, a banker, he was going to work in finance, his mentor was “furious.” America’s finance industry is notorious for skimming the brightest minds from every field.

Towles started writing in first grade, and years later at a Yale seminar was taken aside by Paris Review co-founder Peter Matthiessen, who saw a talent the two made a pact to cultivate. “My great-grandparents,” he allows, “would have been very comfortable in Edith Wharton’s novels.” The upbringing outside Boston that he calls “middle class” involved private school, then Yale and Stanford.

In many ways, Towles writes what he knows. “When someone slams the cup down, it’s got to sound like china hitting the table.” “If it’s a Chekhov play, and they are sitting around the table, and there’s tea on the table, that stuff can’t feel fake,” he says.

The foreground, on the other hand, must be as concrete as the artifacts that bridge the worlds he creates. The author may set his stories in a specific past, but he regards history as only suggestive, like the backdrop in an opera.

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