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What it argues
Rules of Civility opens in 1966, when Katey Kontent — now in her early forties — encounters a series of photographs at a gallery show. The photos are of New York in 1938, and one of them shows a young man she once knew. This frame device unlocks the novel's central year: 1938, when twenty-five-year-old Katey, a typist of modest means, rings in New Year's Eve at a Greenwich Village jazz bar and meets Tinker Grey, a blue-blooded banker with the kind of ease that comes from generations of money. What follows is a portrait of New York's social geography that year — its jazz clubs, its newspapers, its apartments and townhouses — and the question of whether a woman of Katey's intelligence and drive can navigate it on her own terms.
Towles is writing a novel about aspiration, but he has the good sense to give Katey aspirations worth having: she wants to read, to think, to belong to the world she's been born adjacent to. She is not scheming in the way of literary social climbers; she is observing, learning, and choosing — and what she chooses is not always what the reader expects. The novel's closest analog is The Great Gatsby: a first-person narrator from modest circumstances watching wealthy, attractive people move through their world and trying to decide what to make of it. But Katey is sharper than Nick Carraway and the novel is less elegiac, more sardonic.
What it gets right
- 1.
Katey Kontent observes more than she acts, and Towles uses that quality deliberately: the novel is partly about what it costs a smart woman in 1938 to be a spectator rather than a participant.
- 2.
Class in the novel is not just about money but about the unspoken codes — the rules of civility — that determine who belongs where, and Katey's project is to learn those codes without being captured by them.
- 3.
Tinker Grey is presented as an object of fascination before he becomes a person; the novel's slow reveal of who he actually is, versus who he appears to be, is its central structural move.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Amor Towles is an American novelist who spent many years as an investment professional in New York before turning to fiction full-time. Rules of Civility, his debut novel published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller and established his reputation for elegant period fiction. His second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, became one of the most widely read literary novels of the 2010s, spending years on bestseller lists worldwide. The Lincoln Highway, his third novel, debuted at number one in 2021. Towles is known for his meticulous historical research and his commitment to narrative pleasure.
