“We launched ourselves into the evening like satellites and orbited the city two miles above the Earth, powered by failing foreign currencies and finely filtered spirits.”
Amor Towles's stunning debut novel (to be followed by instant classics like "A Gentleman in Moscow," "Lincoln Highway," and "Table for Two") beautiful renders a Manhattan poised between the end of the Depression and the start of the Second World War.
Katherine Kontent finds herself carried into new social stratospheres, juggling the demands of a career and struggling to find her romantic place in an unfamiliar caste.
“He looked like a man who had gained confidence through exposure to a hostile environment; like one who no longer owed anything to anyone.”
To keep the reader on their toes, the protagonist sleeps with at least three dudes in under a year, then, for good measure, had an intense lesbian encounter with an older woman who had pimped out her love -- all in the conservative year of 1938!
“One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.”
In important ways, the novel also works as a love letter to New York, despite its precarious situation: poised at the edge of a massive depression and unspeakable loss by so many. Towles's beautiful imagery and rhythmic pacing are perhaps never on better display than in his descriptions of the city.
“For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise – that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.”
“--That’s the problem with being born in New York, the old newsman observed a little sadly. You’ve got no New York to run away to.”
“Most New Yorkers spent their lives somewhere between the fruit cart and the fifth floor. To see the city from a few hundred feet above the riffraff was pretty celestial. We gave the moment its due.”
"Rules of Civility" somehow demonstrates Towles at his fully formed best, wielding elegant prose in service of vivid characters, an unerring sense of time and setting, and a chronology that unceasingly builds.
Beautifully wrapped by a stellar ending, the novel is both transporting and engrossing, capturing elements of melancholy, love, and carpe diem in equal measure.
“As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion – whether they’re triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment – if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, it’s probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I’ve discovered in life. And you can have it, since it’s been of no use to me.”
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