Rules of Civility

Summary (from the publisher): On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve.

 

Review: In this novel, Katey Kontent relays the remarkable series of events that dominated her life in 1938. On New Year's Eve, Katey and her best friend Evelyn Ross happen to sit beside a handsome banker, Tinker Grey, while at a jazz bar. This chance meeting sets off a series of events that irrevocably alter the paths of all three. This novel has the unique combination of both beautiful and captivating prose and an intriguing story line.

 

Katey is such a brilliant narrator and truly makes this novel. She is a self-made woman, yet very clearly is winging it through life, observing and improvising as she goes. Chameleon-like, she can blend in with the roughest girls from the boarding house or dine in the sleekest establishment in New York City. Obviously well-read, she never boasts about this fact, allowing the reader to find out through her friend Eve's references to her bookworm tendencies upon meeting Tinker. Of course, it becomes glaringly clear as Katey's literary references are abundant; over the course of the novel she makes references to Hemingway, Dickens, Woolf, Thoreau, Christie, London, Stevenson, Twain, and Cooper and visitors to her apartment remark on her stacks of books.

 

The details of this novel capture the sense of New York City in the 30s - the great disparity in social status - the individual atmospheres of rowdy jazz bars, highbrow restaurants, the quiet of the immense churches on a weekday afternoon, and the movie theater: "lighters flickered on and off like fireflies" (29). Towles' writing feels crisp and new, deftly showing Katey's emotions with lines like, "Something fell from my jawbone to the back of my hand. It was a teardrop of all things. So I slapped him" (238).

 

But more than characterization or setting, there were so many moments when reading this when I felt such a connection to the feeling or circumstance described - a kinship with the way Katey observed the world. For instance, this novel so precisely captures the nature of individuals whirling in and out of importance in one's life. Individuals who seem critical fade away and those scarcely noticed at first emerge as central figures. This is particularly fitting for the remarkably insular world that is Manhattan in the late 30s. It's much like a ride on the subway: "The train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on" (3). Katey and Tinker greatly impact each others' story, yet it's solely by chance and such repercussions don't bind the characters to each other. Life is "like a centrifuge that spins every few years casting proximate bodies in disparate directions" (317).

 

And later, I knew exactly what Katey meant when she describes her friend Wallace saying that he is "just the sort who blends into the background of the school photo (or the greeting line at the cotillion) but who, with the passage of time, increasingly stands out against the lapses in character around him" (193). Or the occasional cattiness of even the best female friends, shown in Evelyn's passive aggressive remarks when she discovers that Katey has had coffee with Tinker without her.

 

The title of this novel refers to the rules by which Tinker attempts to live, which are of course the young George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. Of course the irony is that despite keeping a dog-eared copy of the rules, Tinker realizes he has not been faithful to them and doesn't need them to move forward. Yet they chartered his course, which changed Katey's course in 1938.

 

Stars: 5