Review by New York Times Review
This novel's characters try to reinvent themselves in 1930s New York. THE saying "May you live in interesting times" has undeniable resonance for the investment executive-turned-novelist Amor Towles. In 1989, he was set to go to China for two years to teach. When the Tiananmen Square massacre put an abrupt end to that plan, he headed for Manhattan. On his first night in the city, he met two strangers. One would become his brother-in-law; through the other, he found the job in which he has worked for 20 years. What would have happened if he'd hit town a day later? This is the kind of improbable-but-true serendipity that plots the lives of people in their 20s - in whatever epoch - before they know the weight that decisions made in a moment might have. In Towles's first novel, "Rules of Civility," his clever heroine, who grew up in Brooklyn as "Katya," restyles herself in 1930s Manhattan as the more clubbable "Katey," aspiring to all-American inclusion. As World War II gears up, raising the economy from bust to boom, Katey's wit and charm lift her from a secretarial pool at a law firm to a high-profile assistant's perch at a flashy new Condé Nast magazine. One night at the novel's outset touches off the chain reaction that will produce both Katey's career and her husband, and define her entire adult life. She's swept into the satin-and-cashmere embrace of the smart set - blithe young people with names like Dicky and Bitsy and Bucky and Wallace - with their Oyster Bay mansions, their Adirondack camps, their cocktails at the St. Regis and all the fog of Fishers Island. The city does not necessarily allow Katey to forget herself. When she pops into a newsstand at Astor Place to buy The Times, a boy from the old neighborhood recognizes her as he tries to cadge a smoke. "Hey. I know you, right?" he asks. "I don't think so," she replies, noticing that he has "the same presumptuous smile and the wandering eye" that he'd had when they were 14. "That's the problem with being born in New York," the paper seller remarks, after the scrounger saunters off. "You've got no New York to run away to." Except, as Towles so persuasively shows, New Yorkers do have another New York to run away to: the New York of their past. For Katey, who in 1966 is moved to recall hers, this bygone metropolis is the New York of 1938, the most consequential year of her youth. Her memories reanimate that era, awakening in the reader the tingling recognition that her history and the city's remain familiar, latent, even recurrent, with would-be Kateys lurking in office cubicles to this day. With this snappy period piece, Towles resurrects the cinematic black-and-white Manhattan of the golden age of screwball comedy, gal-pal camaraderie and romantic mischief (think of "Stage Door," "Made for Each Other," "My Man Godfrey" and even Fay Wray in "King Kong"). With Katey, we travel by cab and watch Broadway "slipping by the windows like a string of lights being pulled off a Christmas tree," or see limousines idling in front of the 21 Club, smoke spiraling from their tailpipes "like genies from a bottle." These pages prompt recollections of movie scenes stamped so deeply on the psyche that they feel remembered: elevated trains, Carole Lombard and Jimmy Stewart, smoky jazz clubs and men in fedoras. To call such images clichéd would be to call youth clichéd, to call Manhattan itself a cliché. As in the 1937 Lombard film "Nothing Sacred" - which opens with a mighty montage of towering buildings superimposed with the words "This is New York, Skyscraper Champion of the World . . . where the Slickers and Know-It-Alls peddle gold bricks to each other . . . and where Truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye" - an ironic attitude can do little to diminish the power of the city's mythology. And if, as you watch or read such archetypal stories, the thought does arise that nothing (and nobody) is quite as it seems, what remains, as Gershwin wrote, "'s marvelous." Katey rooms in a women's boardinghouse with a strong-willed girl from the Midwest named Eve, who's determined to live in New York without her daddy's financial support. On New Year's Eve in 1937, Katey and Eve head for a Village jazz club with three dollars between them, intending to scrape by on one martini an hour and to peel off to a Ukrainian diner as 1938 dawns, for a 15-cent breakfast of coffee, eggs and toast. Enter a handsome man, "an upright 5-foot-10, dressed in black tie," with brown hair, "royal blue eyes" and a cashmere coat so elegant Eve can't take her eyes off it. She instinctively introduces herself as "Evelyn" to sound a little grander. The man's name is Tinker ("How the WASPs loved to nickname their children after the workaday trades," Katey notes, admiring him all the same). He stands them to drinks, gallantly venturing into the cold night to find Champagne and returning with a bottle hoisted aloft by its neck, "grinning like a truant holding a fish by the tail." Not long after midnight, Tinker disappears, leaving behind a solid gold engraved lighter, like a male Cinderella with a Zippo instead of a slipper. Will one of the roommates add his initials to her monogram? Tracking him down shouldn't be hard; he's let slip that he lives in the Beresford, a luxury building on Central Park West. But once they find him, will he turn out to be a prince? If he is, why does he have a heavily underlined copy of George Washington's notes on proper social behavior (the "Rules of Civility" of the title)? Wouldn't such niceties come naturally to a prince? Towles's central characters are youthful Americans in tricky times, trying to create authentic lives, even if quasi-pseudonymously. "In New York City," he writes, "these sorts of alterations come free of charge." The novel follows Katey through 1938 as her friends and circumstances shift, and as social masks rise, fall and rise again. In Manhattan, she recognizes, a long memory is not always convenient. And from the beginning, the reader knows that after this eventful year, Katey will not see Tinker for nearly three decades - until she happens upon his image at the Museum of Modern Art while strolling with her husband through an exhibition of Walker Evans photographs of subway riders, taken between 1938 and 1941. She spots Tinker in one of them, "ill shaven, in a threadbare coat." When she points out the photograph to her husband, identifying Tinker as an acquaintance, he furrows his brow and says, "Riches to rags." But Katey remarks, "Not exactly." Yes, she thinks, "Tinker looked poor in that picture. . . . But he looked young and vibrant too; and strangely alive." Evans had snapped Tinker the year he quit trying to scale Manhattan's invisible mountain and took work on the docks. Standing on Pier 80, smoking, leaning against a pihng and admiring "the whole staggered assembly of town houses and warehouses and skyscrapers stretching from Washington Heights to the Battery," Tinker had thought that "from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving." As Towles shows, that can be arranged. In a way, that can hardly be avoided. On a fateful night in 1937, the heroine falls into a flirtation that will change the course of her life. Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 14, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
This rhapsodic tribute to a bygone era conjures up mesmerizing images of 1930s New York. Two worlds collide on New Year's Eve 1937, and three lives will never be the same. For Katey Kontent and Eve Ross, two working gals out on the town, a chance encounter with patrician banker Tinker Grey sets into motion a series of events causing far-reaching consequences. As Towles explores the seemingly random ways in which both choice and chance can impact the future, Katey, Eve, and Tinker each face a dark night of the soul, during which fates are twisted, reshaped, and realigned. Discerning readers will draw parallels between Towles and the ominously ironic Edith Wharton while relishing the fact that the snappy dialogue and descriptive prose are wrapped in a compelling narrative.--Flanagan, Margare. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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 glamour-be 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 unease-as with Towles's depiction of how the upper class can use its money and influence to manipulate others' lives in profoundly unsavory ways-that 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. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
On New Year's Eve 1937, at a jazz bar in New York's Greenwich Village, Katey and Eve are charmed by the handsome and successful Tinker Grey. The three become fast friends and spend early 1938 exploring the town together, until a car accident permanently injures Eve. Feeling guilty, Tinker, the driver, takes care of Eve and unsuccessfully tries to love her. Despite the presence and initial impact of Tinker and Eve, though, this first novel is about Katey's 1938. Eve moves on, and Tinker fades, but Katey, the narrator, stays to challenge the New York bourgeois unwaveringly with her acerbic wit, capturing the attention of several doting men. She quits her job as a typist and pursues a career as editor of a respected, if risque, society magazine. And Katey does it without a handout (she thinks). VERDICT Historical love story. Snappy dialog and sophisticated characters. A romantic look at the difficulties of being a New Yorker. But not, as the publisher suggests, reminiscent of Fitzgerald, though similar themes (class, betrayal, despair) arise. This novel would, however, make a nice (contemporary) companion to novels like The Great Gatsby and is thusly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 1/17/11.]-Stephen Morrow, Ohio Univ., Columbus (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.Towles' buzzed-about first novel is an affectionate return to the postJazz Age years, and the literary style that grew out of it (though seasoned with expletives). Brooklyn girl Katey Kontent and her boardinghouse mate, Midwestern beauty Eve Ross, are expert flirts who become an instant, inseparable threesome with mysterious young banker Tinker Grey. With him, they hit all the hot nightspots and consume much alcohol. After a milk truck mauls his roadster with the women in it, permanently scarring Eve, the guilt-ridden Tinker devotes himself to her, though he and she both know he has stronger feelings for Katey. Strong-willed Katey works her way up the career ladder, from secretarial job on Wall Street to publisher's assistant at Cond Nast, forging friendships with society types and not allowing social niceties to stand in her way. Eve and Tinker grow apart, and then Kate, belatedly seeing Tinker for what he is, sadly gives up on him. Named after George Washington's book of moral and social codes,this novel documents with breezy intelligence and impeccable reserve the machinations of wealth and power at an historical moment that in some ways seems not so different from the current one. Tinker, echoing Gatsby, is permanently adrift. The novel is a bit light on plot, relying perhaps too much on description. But the characters are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is sharp and Towles avoids the period nostalgia and sentimentality to which a lesser writer might succumb.An elegant, pithy performance by a first-time novelist who couldn't seem more familiar with his characters or territory.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
