Rating: ****
Tags: Fiction, General, Young women, Literary, Psychological Fiction, Psychological, Historical, New York, New York (State), Man-Woman Relationships, New York (N.Y.), Nineteen Thirties, Wall Street (New York; N.Y.), Upper Class - New York (State) - New York, Upper Class, Wall Street (New York, N.Y.), Lang:en
Summary
WHAT THEY SAID about RULES OF CIVILITY: 'Everything about
this novel, set in 1930s New York, is achingly stylish - from
the author's name to the slinky jacket design. Katey Kontent,
daughter of Russian immigrants, and Evie Ross, from the sleepy
midwest, are an ambitious, wisecracking pair who, despite lack
of money and connections, aim to set the city alight. A
fortuitous meeting with the apparently wealthy Tinker Grey on
New Year's Eve, 1937, will change the course of both their
lives.' - Guardian 'If you want shopping at Bendel's, gin
martinis at a debutante's mansion and jazz bands playing until
3am, RULES OF CIVILITY has it all and more ...While you're lost
in the whirl of silk stockings, furs and hip flasks, all you
care about is what Katey Kontent does next. Another one
bartender, please.' - Observer 'Irresistible ...A cross between
Dorothy Parker and Holly Golightly, Katey Kontent is a
priceless narrator in her own right - the brains of a
bluestocking with the legs of a flapper and the mores of Carrie
Bradshaw.' - Telegraph 'Towles creates a narrative that
sparkles with sentences so beautiful you'll stop and re-read
them. A delicious and memorable novel that will leave you
wistful ...and desperate for a martini.' - Stylist 'My book of
the year. If the unthinkable happened and I could never read
another new work of fiction in 2011, I'd simply re-read this
sparkling, stylish book, with yet another round of martinis as
dry as the author's wit.' - Herald
Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2011
Set during the hazy, enchanting, and martini-filled world of
New York City circa 1938,
Rules of Civility follows three friends--Katey, Eve,
and Tinker--from their chance meeting at a jazz club on New
Year's Eve through a year of enlightening and occasionally
tragic adventures. Tinker orbits in the world of the wealthy;
Katey and Eve stretch their few dollars out each evening on the
town. While all three are complex characters, Katey is the
story's shining star. She is a fully realized heroine, unique
in her strong sense of self amidst her life's continual
fluctuations. Towles' writing also paints an inviting picture
of New York City, without forgetting its sharp edges.
Reminiscent of Fitzgerald,
Rules of Civility is full of delicious sentences you
can sit back and savor (most appropriately with a martini or
two).
--Caley Anderson
A sophisticated and entertaining debut novel about an
irresistible young woman with an uncommon sense of
purpose.
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.
Amor Towles's
Rules of Civility Playlist
You can listen to the playlist here.
While jazz is not central to the narrative of
Rules of Civility, the music and its various
formulations are an important component of the book’s
backdrop. On the night of January 16, 1938, Benny Goodman assembled a
bi-racial orchestra to play jazz to a sold-out Carnegie
Hall--the first jazz performance in the hallowed hall and one
which is now famous for bringing jazz (and black performers) to
a wider audience. I am not a jazz historian, but for me the
concert marks something of a turning point in jazz itself--from
the big-band, swing-era sound that dominated the 1930s (and
which the orchestra emphasized on stage that night) towards the
more introspective, smaller group styles that would soon spawn
bebop and its smoky aftereffects (ultimately reaching an apogee
with Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue in 1957). For it is also in 1938 that
Coleman Hawkins recorded the bebop antecedent "Body & Soul"
and Minton’s Playhouse, one of the key bebop gathering
spots, opened in Harlem. By 1939, Blue Note Records was
recording, and Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious
Monk were all congregating in New York City. From 1935-1939,
Goodman himself was stepping out of the big-band limelight to
make more intimate improvisational recordings with a quartet
including Gene Krupa and Lionel Hampton. My assertion of this as a turning point (like most such
assertions) is rough, inexact and misleading, but it helps give
shape to an evolution and bring into relief two ends of a jazz
spectrum. On the big-band front, the power of the music
naturally springs from the collective and orchestration. In
numbers like "Sing, Sing, Sing," the carefully layered,
precisely timed waning and waxing of rhythm and instrumentation
towards moments of unified musical ecstasy simply demand that
the audience collaborate through dance, cheers, and other
outward expressions of joy. While in the smaller groups of
bebop and beyond, the expressive power springs more from the
soloist and his personal exploration of the music, his
instrument, and his emotional state at that precise moment in
time. This inevitably inspires in the listener a cigarette, a
scotch, and a little more introspection. In a sense, the two
ends of this jazz spectrum are like the public/private paradox
of Walker Evans’s subway photographs (and of life in the
metropolis itself.) If you are interested, I have created an playlist of music
from roughly 1935-1945 that spans this transition. The playlist
is not meant to be comprehensive or exact. Among other items,
it includes swinging live performances from Goodman’s
Carnegie Hall Concert as well as examples of his smaller group
work; there are precursors to bebop like Coleman Hawkins and
some early Charlie Parker. As a strange historical footnote,
there was a strike in 1942–1944 by the American
Federation of Musicians, during which no official recordings
were made. As such, this period at the onset of bebop was
virtually undocumented and thus the records of 1945 reflect
something of a culmination of early bebop rather than its
starting point. The playlist also reflects the influence of the
great American songbook giants (Cole Porter, Duke Ellington,
Irving Berlin, Rodgers & Hart, the Gershwins), many of whom
were at the height of their powers in the 1930s.
--Amor Towles
Listen to the playlist
'Terrific. A smart, witty, charming dry-martini of a novel.'
-- David Nicholls, author of One Day 'Achingly stylish ...
witty, slick production, replete with dark intrigue, period
details, and a suitably Katharine Hepburn-like heroine.' --
Guardian 'The summer's must-read: gripping and beautiful.' --
Sunday Times 'This is a flesh-and-blood tale you believe in,
with fabulous period detail. It's all too rare to find a fun,
glamorous, semi-literary tale to get lost in ... While you're
lost in the whirl of silk stockings, fur and hip flasks, all
you care about is what Katey Kontent does next.' -- Viv
Groskop, Observer 'Irresistible ... A cross between Dorothy
Parker and Holly Golightly, Katey Kontent is a priceless
narrator in her own right - the brains of a bluestocking with
the legs of a flapper and the mores of Carrie Bradshaw.' --
Elena Seymenliyska, Telegraph 'Because who doesn't want to be
transported to Thirties Manhattan?' -- Lucy ManganAmazon.com Review
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