Rules of Civility

This was simultaneously a love letter to New York City, and how every little thing in life can trigger a cascade of events that changes how the cookie crumbles. I first discovered (and loved) Towles with A Gentleman In Moscow, so I was therefore naturally curious about this earlier work, published in 2011 and a full 8 years before Gentleman. The quiet and aloof detachment of the narrator and the narrative took a bit to get used to, but I couldn't help getting sucked in nevertheless into Katey's mildly cynical yet wildly intense assessment and dissection of life and its meaning. The only reason why I'd rate AGIM a little higher than this one is really only because I have a soft spot for AGIM's subject matter of found family.

“For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity into the ether of the finely superfluous?”

Katey Kontent and her colleague, roommate, and partner in crime Evelyn Ross go out for a night on the town on New Year's Eve, 1937, where they bump into a smartly dressed young man, Tinker Grey. This unexpected and fateful meeting starts a chain of events that irrevocably changes all three lives for good.

“Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke up in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee.”

We mostly follow Katey in the story. As previously mentioned, her detached manner of narration gives a sense of distance from the events of the story. Similarly, Towles makes a pretty big choice of formatting all the dialogue in this book without quotation marks, and simply demarcating them as speech by an em dash at the start of what ought to be dialogue. The mixing of narrative and dialogue deepens that sense of distance between us readers and the action, and it helps permeate that haziness of memory throughout the story, which essentially it would be since this would be a future and older Katey looking back at the events of 1938.

I had mixed feelings for Katey. On one hand, she was pretty relatable and occasionally sympathetic, with her obsession with books and her being caught in between a child-like state of wanting to believe the best of the people around her and wanting to do right by them, and being jaded about life and society after having had to make her own way and living in New York City since she was orphaned at 19. For the first half of the book, she was so detached that I could barely really feel much for her except as the vehicle through which we are experiencing the events of the story, but I did feel more sympathy for her as the second half unfolded. We found out more about her, and she also began getting more personally involved in the events rather than acting the observer.

Tinker Grey gave me some Jay Gatsby vibes, although with marked differences. The entire denouement of the story revolves around him, and I guess he comes close to being the male equivalent of a manic pixie dream girl to Katey. We see and hear a lot about him but ultimately I found it difficult to be very much attached to him, although this might be more because of me than of the narrative.

Perhaps my favourite character in this whole story was Wallace. He was a cinnamon roll that's too precious for this world.

“In that sense, 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 revision–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.”

Overall, this book is wistful, mildly sad, but also a gentle affectionate reminder to us about how much our life paths are just as much made by chance as by intention.