Books: Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (2011)

"On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar with her boardinghouse roommate stretching three dollars as far as it will go when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a tempered smile, happens to sit at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a yearlong journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool toward the upper echelons of New York society and the executive suites of Condé Nast--rarefied environs where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve. Wooed in turn by a shy, principled multi-millionaire, and an irrepressible Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, befriended by a single-minded widow who is ahead of her time, and challenged by an imperious mentor, Katey experiences firsthand the poise secured by wealth and station and the failed aspirations that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her life, she begins to realize how our most promising choices inevitably lay the groundwork for our regrets."

Amor Towles debut novel, Rules Of Civility, is a Valentine, a love letter to a much earlier time in America, set during the Depression of the 1930s and before the onslaught of WWII. It has wit, style, charm, and drama that will remind anyone found of some Hollywood films that came out in that period. We have Katey Kontent, who through sheer coincidence and smarts gets a chance to see how the “other” half lives. But Towles does not give us a fool, as Katey is very much aware of her situations and keeps her mostly on the peripheral side of this high society.

Towles brings 1930’s New York to life in ways that are astounding and magical and gives (at times) a thoroughly modern and brilliantly smart woman in the form of Katey. Part of this modernism aspect may have to do with our narrator telling this story in 1966 and her sayings and wordings are a product of her middle-aged mind looking back, but it does not interrupt the narrative flow too much. But again, there is a lot of coincidences and some conveniences that pop up here –but I think that’s part of what Towles was trying to imitate here, that Katey’s story can be a bit unrealistic for the time period but that’s what made this era sort of magical. 

It's a fairly wonderful novel, even if a bit unrealistic.