Bright Lights, Great Depression

In Amor Towles’s witty and slyly brutal debut novel, Rules of Civility, the protagonist is one Katey Kontent. You stress the second syllable: con-tent, as in “satisfied.”

Only problem is, Katey isn’t.

It’s 1938 as the story opens, and Katey has just about had it with the narrow options facing a young woman in Depression-era Manhattan. By day she’s a drone in a typing pool. By night she’s free to roll her eyes at men’s advances in bars and dance halls, so long as she drags herself back to her Flatiron District boardinghouse before its midnight curfew.

See also: Civility: The Art of First Impressions.

Enter Tinker Grey — a well-spoken, seemingly well-heeled banker who brings some zip into the lives of Katey and her roommate, Eve. No sooner has Tinker ushered Katey to a seat at the swanky 21 Club, however, than she begins to wonder what it means to have arrived. How did this Tinker fellow get to be so wealthy, anyhow? And why is he so evasive about his past? Snooping in his apartment, Katey discovers a book on his nightstand listing 110 “Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation,” written by George Washington when he was a teenager. Why would a purported member of the gentry be clinging to some fusty manual on good manners?

The core plot of Rules of Civility solves the various mysteries surrounding Tinker, but the book’s heartbeat is Katey’s voice — brassy, no-nonsense, acutely observant. Though she’s intrigued by Tinker, she is too leery of his character to pursue a romantic involvement. (As they say on Facebook, “It’s complicated.” In part Katey obligingly defers to her roommate — Eve seems more interested in Tinker — but Towles suggests there’s something dark about the dude, too: When his godmother drops a few cryptic details about Tinker’s personality, Katey’s people radar warns her to steer clear of that particular blip.) Katey is also instinctively skeptical of upper-crust social circles, even as Tinker eagerly helps her infiltrate them. Watching her supposed social “betters” swan about at a racetrack, she observes, “This was like the circles of Dante’s Inferno — populated with men of varied sins, but also with the shrewdness and devotion of the damned.”

Towles’s neat trick as a debut novelist is to free Katey to question the integrity of high society while giving the reader ample opportunity to luxuriate in it. She’s rightfully wary of folks for whom “the improbable would be made probable, the implausible plausible and the impossible possible.” But riding in a chauffeured Bentley has its charms, she has to admit, and the novel dishes out heaping silver spoonfuls of posh living inside country houses, tony restaurants and private clubs. Like so many fellow migrants to Manhattan, Katey is trying to shuck off her past: She even changes her first name (from the original “Katya”) to scrub away the aroma of her upbringing among rough-hewn Russian-immigrant stock in Brooklyn. What she can’t abide is naked striving, particularly among young women fishing for a rich husband and a bourgeois perch.

Next: Eve’s blithe behavior soon unleashes Katey’s inner Dorothy Parker. >>