Have you ever read a book where you've felt like you were inhabiting the character's world? A world you didn't want to leave? I think I want to be Katey Kontent. She's intelligent and beautiful and clever--I especially like the clever part. She's whip-smart and articulate and always ready with an astute answer or comment in whatever situation she finds herself. She's self-confident in a way that I never have been but wish I could be. I wasn't quite sure what to make of Amor Towles' Rules of Civility when I first started reading. It's a story where loads happens but at the same time not much at all, but it grew on me so much as I read that I hated to finish it. Even more I hated giving the book back to the library.
The setting is New York in 1938 and like the gorgeous photo on the cover of the book the city shines through with elegance and sophistication. The story revolves around Katey and her friend Eve and a man they meet on New Year's Eve. The two will both define her world and change it. Both women work in an office typing pool and live in a boardinghouse with strict rules and early curfews. Theodore Gray, or Tinker as he's known, happens into the bar where the two women are nursing drinks and trying to make their cash stretch. Tinker is handsome and exudes an air of wealth and assurance and sweeps both women off their feet. Although they are best friends something of a rivalry erupts.
Though Tinker favors Katey just a tad bit more, a freak accident that leaves Eve scarred and injured causes Tinker to show his grief, since he was driving, in a way that will exclude Katey. Still, Katey, who is the daughter of Russian immigrants gains entrée into a society she would not otherwise have known. She takes it all in stride and blossoms. She finds work at one of Condé Nast's very cosmopolitan magazines and rubs elbows with with the rich and decadent. And she always does it with panache, yet her life isn't as perfect as it might sound. She may move in blue-blooded circles but she is still every bit a New York girl with a working class background. She has just the right amount of moxie to succeed and find happiness despite the obstacles set in her path.
The story is bookended by two scenes looking back on that life altering year. Almost thirty years later Katey and her husband attend an exhibit of photographs by Walker Evans which were taken on the subway unbeknownst to the subjects. Evans captures the sensibilities of those he photographs, and by chance Tinker is one of his subjects. He appears in not one but two of the photos, one at the height of his career and the other showing a drastic reversal of fortune.
Amor Towles does an exceptional job of painting a portrait of Depression era New York--both the glitzy New York of the 21 Club and the more sobering New York of flophouses and dive bars. All through the story you can hear the sounds of jazz music and martinis swishing in silver shakers. The smart, classy prose entirely matches the story and makes this a pleasure to read. And the literary references (from Thoreau to Hemingway to Agatha Christie!) help set the tone.
"I read a lot of Agatha Christie that fall of 1938--maybe all of them. The Hercule Poirots, the Miss Marples. Death on the Nile. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Murders...on the Links...at the Vicarage, and...on the Orient Express. I read them on the subway, at the deli, and in my bed alone."
"You can make what claims you will about the psychological nuance of Proust or the narrative scope of Tolstoy, but you can't argue that Mrs. Christie fails to please. Her books are tremendously satisfying."
"Yes, they are formulaic. But that's one of the reasons they are so satisfying. With every character, every room, every murder weapon feeling at once newly crafted and familiar as rote (the role of the postimperialists uncle from India here being played by the spinster from South Wales, and the mismatched bookends sanding in for the jar of fox poison on the upper shelf of the gardener's shed), Mrs. Christie doles out her little surprises at the carefully calibrated pace of a nanny dispensing sweets to the children in her care."
"But I think here is another reason they please--a reason that is at least as important, if not more so--and that is that in Agatha Christie's universe everyone gets what they deserve."
Life is not quite so easy in Katey's world. Fortunes rise and fall, characters come and go, but Katey remains true to herself. I thought this was beautfully done.