Rules of Civility

“...life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”

Rules of Civility is the story of Katey Kontent, twenty-five in 1938, child of Russian immigrants, working in a typing pool on Wall Street. She meets many people in that single year, and it is the people she meets and the opportunities they present that create her entire life.

Author Amor Towles has a beautiful way of setting up a scene and then closing the door, leaving the reader to imagine what is going on. He has created bright and entirely human characters, characters who have mysterious pasts and unexpected futures, much like the real people we see and meet every day. Towles captures the world of 1938, uncertain times following uncertain times, in New York City where people can become fast friends in the matter of a few days, and where everyone is in the process of making and remaking their lives with whatever chance brings to bear.

Rules of Civility offers the best things a novel can provide: complete immersion in another world, as well as thoughtful takeaways from the experience.