The Rules of Civility

The Rules of Civility 

By Amor Towles

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.

With its sparkling depiction of New York's social strata, its intricate imagery and themes, and its immensely appealing characters, Rules of Civility won the hearts of readers and critics alike.

As much as I liked A Gentleman in Moscow (and I liked it very much; I bought the book and if you know anything about me that will tell you enough) I really resisted reading Rules for some time.  It sounded feckless and Fitzgerald-y, and I've never read The Great Gatsby, nor do I intend to, as I've had enough navel-gazing of men from authors who have never considered women for a lifetime. But after the last string of failures, I figured I needed to cleanse my palate, and this was a good choice.  

Rules is a genteel, civil (ha!) piece of writing about a determined young woman and a momentous year in her life, which unfolds to her in ways both unexpected and mysterious (at least until the last chapter).  It is, like Gentleman, unhurried, and delights in savoring the details.  Although it feels ridiculous to say this, it felt very much like a love letter to New York.  Yuck, and now that I've gotten that bit of trite-ness out of my system, perhaps we can move forward.  

Katey (Katya/Kate/Katherine/Kathy/etc) Kon-tent is a young woman of Russian heritage who grew up in Brighton Beach and has a quiet, reading-inclined philosophical bent.  Although the novel is framed by an art exhibit, almost thirty years later, the book really opens on New Year's Eve 1937, and runs through 1938 as Kate's life changes, beginning with a chance meeting that first night.  

Although the book itself savors, as I said, the details of the late 1930s, and spends quite a lot of time just living in each moment, the final chapter/epilogue pulls it together, as Kate (and therefore the reader) realizes that the choices made in 1938, while bittersweet in some ways, as they are not without pain, and carry with them the closing of other possibilities and doors, are not to be regretted, as long as you have made them with clear eyes and hearts, truthfully to yourself. It's exactly the kind of morality tale I need right now, as my own accumulation of youthful choices has found me in a very particular place and way that seems to lead to only a single path now. While it is a comfortable and enjoyable life, I am only human, and I wonder at what might not have been, if I'd been less cautious, less fixed in my goals, more susceptible to flattery, more open to people.  But that is not the person I am, and I like the person I am quite a bit, and reading the end of Rules, it reminded me that even though we may be wistful about the road not taken, that the possibilities of other roads were available in the first place is a wonderful thing; and there will always be (as Cheryl Strayed also said) some regret for not being able to live both choices, and sometimes to be content you must be simply bound to find the choice you regret the least.   

There's certainly some literary sleight of hand going on as well, not only in the (seemingly, but I'm no expert) well-researched period details, but also in repeated themes - the idea of names and nicknames come up quite a bit.  Kate muses multiple times about shedding old names and she herself basically accepts any variation on her name that others call her.  It was hard even to find a place where she refers to herself by her chosen name.  

The book itself is also pretty short, doesn't wear out its welcome. It's cut into four sections by season (winter, spring, summer, fall) and framed by her encounters with what turns out to be the man who got away, and first love of her life, Tinker Grey, aforementioned chance meetee.  Although we get a variety of clues telling us how perfect they are for each other (both overt and subtle), fate (and choice) operates to draw them apart at various points just as they seem to be on the verge of coming together.  Kate's friend, Eve, who is injured in a car wreck while Tinker is driving, asserts an early wedge into their potential relationship, and the discovery that Tinker is actually doing his ersatz godmother in order to live the rich life finishes the job. The realization that Tinker is not wealthy as he appeared to her to be but is in fact a self-made man, more like her than not, seems to shake her just as much, if not more, than his arrangement with the other woman, although to Kate's credit, the first realization results in her recognizing her own prejudices and assumptions.

There's certainly themes in Rules about choosing to be true to yourself rather than being, as various characters say, under someone else's thumb.  Eve refuses marriage and flees to LA, Tinker breaks up with his madam and ends up a blue-collar worker, while his brother burns the vestiges of their tainted money and enlists in the army.  Kate's various beaus also enlist in the army according to their own consciences at various points, her friend Fran tells her she's going to be married and have five kids and sagging tits, but she's delighted anyway because that's what she wants.  And Kate moves up in the world, financially and socially, although her real wishes are more opaque than these others.  Perhaps it is enough that she is, at the end of the book, thirty years later, content and satisfied.  

Anyway, did I like the book? Yes, it was well written and engaging and not mean-spirited or raucous.  It's more contemplative, although not without wit.  For all that it captures a wild year and we spend almost every chapter in a new setting, it's somewhat slower paced. Comparing it to Towles' other work, it's less charming and comedic than Gentleman, although both deal with the idea of a life and making the choice to live with integrity.  For all that Rules is about a young woman in her prime and Gentleman about a man who is already old when the book begins (spiritually if not physically) Rules seems more wistful and ephemeral, various people eking out all the happiness and gaiety now while they can, though that could just be me reading it as someone who knows what is coming for all the gay young things with the advent of the 1940s.  Of course, Gentleman avoids this feeling by eliding over certain realities of Russian life after the war, some more literary sleight of hand.  

We all have to live with ourselves, but it's hard not to be grateful, like Katya is, to have had the choices at all.