Being able to submerge readers in a particular era/time/place is one of Amor Towles’s super powers. Whether it’s early 20th century Russia, or the 1950s American midwest, readers can expect to feel and breathe an era through Towles’ expertly crafted prose. In Rules of Civility, Towles’s debut novel, we find ourselves transported to New York in the late 1930s, just as the city is starting to see the light at the end of a grueling decade, a decade that “launched the Great Depression just to teach Manhattan a lesson.”
The novel focuses on Katey Kontent (kon-TENT, as in satisfied), who finds herself in a Jazz Club with her roommate Eve on the last night of 1937. The two are stretching their meager dollars to be able to ring in the New Year with a drink when handsome, wealthy Tinker Grey walks in. As the members of the trio spend more time together, it seems that Katey and Tinker are, to Eve’s chagrin, a couple-in-the-making, until an accident leaves Eve seriously injured. You might think this story is about a love triangle, but you’d be, well, not exactly wrong, but you’d be tragically oversimplifying the situation.
Katey doesn’t hang around pining for Tinker (though he makes it difficult by continuing to involve her in his and Eve’s “situation”). She meets Wallace Walcott, an old pal of Tinker, with whom she has a pleasant-though-not-earth-moving-romance. Through an old boarding house friend, she encounters the underground art scene, where she meets Tinker’s estranged brother Hank. After sidling her way into a job at a publishing house, she starts hanging in social circles way above her pay grade and meets Dicky Vanderwhile, an irrepressible and mostly harmless troublemaker. The job at the publishing house leads to a more demanding but more glamorous job at Condé Nast, where she makes herself indespensible. In what seems like a much longer time period than it actually is, Katey moves up and moves on.
Katey is a fabulous heroine who, at 25, is wise to the ways of the world and dispenses folksy wisdom like Will Rogers in a flapper jacket. (“Be careful when choosing what you’re proud of–because the world has every intention of using it against you.”) She isn’t a victim or a martyr and, though she has some help along the way, her understated grit keeps her moving forward. This novel is teeming with supporting characters, many of whom play key roles in future chapters, so you’d be wise to take note of even the smallest appearances. (Incidentally, for fans of Eve, she has a starring role in the novella Eve in Hollywood, which I also recommend).
The title of the novel, incidentally, comes from Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, a list of 110 tips for decent living, as written out by George Washington when he was about 14 years old. The list begins, “Every Action done in Company, ought to be with Some Sign of Respect, to those that are Present” and quickly moves to the crowd-pleasing “When in Company, put not your Hands to any Part of the Body, not usualy [sic] Discovered.”
Towles is a clever writer, making the characters’ paths cross in expected and unexpected places. The book lover in me smiles appreciatively at his literary references (though even I have to admit that Tinker’s assertion that Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is “the greatest adventure of them all” is more than a bit of a stretch). What I love most about Rules of Civility, though, is that it’s the rare “relationship” novel that doesn’t end either in misery or excessive sentimentality. The ending is satisfying without being neatly wrapped up with a bow. As Katey ponders on a New Year’s Eve three years after her story began, life is “. . . basically a centerfuge that spins every few years casting proximate bodies in disparate directions. And when the spinning stops, almost before we can catch our breath, life crowds us with a calendar of new concerns. Even if we wanted to retrace our steps and rekindle our old acquaintances, how could we possibly find the time?”