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Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year- old named Katey Kontent. Armed with little more than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future.
The story opens on New Year's Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her boardinghouse roommate Eve happen to meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a ready smile. This chance encounter and its startling consequences cast Katey off her current course, but end up providing her unexpected access to the rarified offices of Conde Nast and a glittering new social circle. Befriended in turn by a shy, principled multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, and a single-minded widow who is ahead of her times, Katey has the chance to experience first hand the poise secured by wealth and station, but also the aspirations, envy, disloyalty, and desires that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her orbit, she will learn how individual choices become the means by which life crystallizes loss.
Elegant and captivating, Rules of Civility turns a Jamesian eye on how spur of the moment decisions define life for decades to come. A love letter to a great American city at the end of the Depression, readers will quickly fall under its spell of crisp writing, sparkling atmosphere and breathtaking revelations, as Towles evokes the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Capote, and McCarthy.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
July 26, 2011 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780307934536
- File size: 347610 KB
- Duration: 12:04:11
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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In the setup for this wonderfully told story, Katey Kontent attends a retrospective of Walker Evans photographs in the 1960s. There, amid Depression-era portraits of New Yorkers riding the subway, she is stopped by a picture of a man down on his luck. She says to her prosperous husband, "It's Tinker Gray." Soon we are in a vintage world ourselves, so impeccably does Amor Towles re-create Katey's New York of 1938 as she remembers who she was then, who Tinker was to her, and, finally, what his Evans portrait really means. Rebecca Lowman has an unusually beautiful voice and inhabits and distinguishes her characters so smoothly that she seems to disappear into the story, a gift to the listener. This production is a total pleasure. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from March 14, 2011
In his smashing debut, Towles details the intriguing life of Katherine Kontent and how her world is upended by the fateful events of 1938. Kate and her roommate, Evelyn Ross, have moved to Manhattan for its culture and the chance to class up their lives with glamourâbe it with jazz musicians, trust fund lotharios, or any man with a hint of charm who will pay for dinner and drinks. Both Kate and Evelyn are enamored of sophisticated Tinker Grey, who they meet in a jazz club; he appears to be another handsome, moneyed gent, but as the women vie for his affection, a tragic event may seal a burgeoning romance's fate. New York's wealthy class is thick with snobbery, unexpected largesse, pettiness, jealousies, and an unmistakable sense of who belongs and who does not, but it's the undercurrent of uneaseâas with Towles's depiction of how the upper class can use its money and influence to manipulate others' lives in profoundly unsavory waysâthat gives his vision depth and complexity. His first effort is remarkable for its strong narrative, original characters and a voice influenced by Fitzgerald and Capote, but clearly true to itself.
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