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Rules of Civility by Amor Towles: book review



Rules of Civility (2011) is set over one year in America in 1938, during the Great Depression and after the 1937 Recession: ‘After the Crash, you couldn’t hear the bodies hitting the pavement, but there was a sort of communal gasp and then a stillness that fell over the city like snow.’

On the last night of 1937, poor 25-year-old Katherine (Katey) Kontent, and her friend Eve Ross, ‘stretching three dollars as far as it would go’ accidentally meet Theodore (Tinker) Grey, a handsome banker, at the Hotspot jazz club.

When Tinker arrives at her boardinghouse in a silver Mercedes coupe, Katey calculates that ‘if all the girls at Mrs. Martingale’s saved a year’s pay, we couldn’t have afforded one.’ After three months, Katey was in a new studio apartment on Eleventh Street. 

Katey, the philosophical bookworm, has competition for Tinker Grey – the energetic, beautiful Eve Ross. Just as Tinker is getting closer to Katey, he becomes even more attracted to Eve after a car crash, fueled by his own guilt at causing the accident. Katey becomes ‘Waity Katey’ as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her life. 

Narrated by Katey, she describes her year-long adventures from a Wall Street typist to the upper echelons of New York society and Conde Nast, the magazine company, while Eve Ross is regularly travelling abroad for luxury holidays with Tinker. Katey turns to friend Dicky Vanderwhile for advice: ‘If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us, he said, then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.’

The male author, Amor Towles, is writing this ‘wanna-be-loved’ story from a female perspective, yet it works. Reminiscent of the 1973 movie, The Way We Were (Robert Redford as Hubbell Gardiner and Barbra Streisand as Katie Morosky), the themes of class difference, societal expectations, memories and regrets, and being true to yourself, continue throughout the novel.

Written in four parts: Wintertime, Springtime, Summertime, and Fall, it completes Katey’s rapid career rise through the annual cycle of seasons. The title, Rules of Civility, is a reference to Tinker’s playbook.

Rules of Civility is the author’s first book, and although it is superbly written, his third book, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), is the one worthy of 5 stars. This novel is less riveting, with a more circumspect plotline, but no less beautiful and poetic in its writing. 







MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).


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