What is Rules of Civility about?

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.

The prose is the book's main event. Towles writes with an elegance that is clearly conscious and occasionally borders on self-display, but the period recreation is done with genuine craft — the right details, the right names, the right sense of how a world looked before the war would change everything. The title comes from George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour, a list of social codes the novel uses as an ironic counterpoint to the various ways its characters improvise their own codes.

For a debut novel, the ambition is impressive and mostly realized. Some of the plot mechanics in the second half feel convenient, and Tinker's resolution is too easily handled. But Katey Kontent is one of the more memorable narrators in recent American fiction — a woman who has made herself out of attention and language and will not be defined by either her origins or her romantic choices.