Rules of Civility

Amor Towles’s 2011 debut novel Rules of Civility opens on New Year’s Eve 1937, when two young women, Katey Kontent and her roommate Eve Ross, meet the wealthy, enigmatic banker Tinker Grey at a Greenwich Village jazz bar. That chance encounter propels Katey from a stenographer’s pool in a Wall Street law firm into Manhattan’s upper reaches of society, nightclubs, and publishing. The title comes from the copybook maxims George Washington transcribed as a boy, which Tinker keeps at his apartment, and the novel repeatedly tests how far manners and restraint can carry a person in a city ruled by money and chance. Towles structures the book across the calendar year 1938, dividing it into sections such as “Winter,” “Spring,” “Summer,” and “Fall,” each marking a shift in Katey’s circumstances and in her relationships with Eve and Tinker. The narrative is retrospective: Katey, now in her mid-fifties, recounts the year after seeing a photograph of Tinker in a 1966 exhibition of Walker Evans’s subway portraits, which frames the story as an act of memory and reappraisal. Set largely in Manhattan—Greenwich Village, Wall Street, the Upper East Side, and the publishing world—the novel moves through speakeasies-turned-supper-clubs, the offices of Condé Nast, and Long Island estates. Katey, the first-person narrator and protagonist, is the sharp-eyed center of the book, while Eve is her glamorous, risk-taking foil and Tinker the object of both women’s attention. Secondary figures include Tinker’s circle of old-money friends and Katey’s colleagues in journalism. A widely noted feature is Towles’s attention to period detail and social codes, and the plot turns on accidents, ambition, and the unwritten rules of class. The book is a character-driven historical novel about friendship, self-invention, and the cost of rising in a stratified city.