If I had a list of authors who can make a laundry list sound interesting, Amor Towles would surely be near the top of it. (If anyone has already curated a list like that, I’d love to see it – just saying.) Rules of Civility is Towles’s first novel and the writing is just as good as the later books that have made his name: A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway. There’s the same nuanced prose, the characters that seem to breathe on the page, the originality of the storyline.
In this novel we’re in New York City, mostly over a year that begins on New Year’s Eve 1937. Twenty-somethings Katherine Kontent and her roommate, Eve Ross, are out to celebrate, finding themselves in a lacklustre nightclub, where complicated jazz solos make it kind of interesting. Here they stumble upon Tinker Grey, a slightly older, impeccably dressed and very handsome young man.
The three strike up a friendship that pulls them all in different directions. Both girls are drawn to Tinker, but he’s just so enigmatic, it’s hard to tell if either can win his heart. In the meantime they just hang out together, enjoying the vibe they create as a small group of friends. An accident pushes a guilt-ridden Tinker towards Eve, and Katherine shrugs off her disappointment and gets on with life.
It is Katherine’s voice who narrates the story and we follow her progress from a typing pool, to a publishing house and then the competitive world of a society magazine. She’s sharp, witty and hard working, but then she needs to be – she’s rubbing shoulders with an Ivy League-educated elite, while she herself is from fairly humble beginnings. Everything she has she’s had to earn herself. In the background Tinker and Eve waft in and out of her life, while other relationships come and go.
The book is peopled with lively, colourful New Yorkers – the drinking buddies Katherine makes through the girls she works with; well-heeled and influential friends and acquaintances of Tinker’s; the raw, working class guys who hang out with Tinker’s artist brother. Katherine has a gift for fitting in and adding to whichever group she meets and in this way is the perfect narrator.
In front of the boardinghouse Tinker was standing beside a Mercedes coupé as silver as mercury. If all the girls at Mrs. Martingale’s saved a year’s pay, we couldn’t have afforded one.
Fran Pacelli, the five-foot-nine City College dropout from North Jersey who lived down the hall, whistled like a hard hat appreciating the hem of a skirt. Eve and I went down the steps.
Tinker was obviously in a good mood. He gave Eve a kiss on the cheek and a You look terrific. When he turned to me, he smiled and gave my hand a squeeze. He didn’t offer me the kiss or the compliment, but Eve was watching and she could tell that she was the one who’d been short-changed.
A lot happens in just one year, and you can’t help thinking that for many in 1938, times were tough. But not among the glittering social set of New York. The story builds to some surprising revelations, particularly about Tinker but also about others who pass through Katherine’s orbit, the main action of the story bookended by her visit to a photographic exhibition decades later and a kind of catch-up with what has happened in the meantime.
It all makes for a satisfying read: the brilliantly rendered view of 1930s New York, the story of a woman determined to make her own way, the glorious writing. Rules of Civility is just as good as the other books by Amor Towles, and I look forward to his collection of short stories, Table for Two, as well as whatever else he’s got in the pipeline. I know they’ll all be five-star reads, just like this one.
Judith McKinnon 