The Rules of Civility Kindle

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My suggestion? If you have not read The Rules of Civility what are you waiting for? This amazing novel by first time author blew me away. I originally red the book as a review galley on my computer. I later bought the book on Kindle. (ebook gallies blow up and disintegrate after 29 days,3 hours, and 34 minutes). Or something like that.

The Rules of Civility is wonderful from its original narrator, the spunky Katey Kontent from Coney Island to the descriptions of time and place. You will feel like you are in New York with Katey and the other characters on the eve of World War II.

What drives the novel? A love triangle, what else. However, Towles makes it seem fresh and new. Katey and two friends, the gentleman Tinker Grey and the beautiful Eve Ross are in a terrible accident. Eve comes away from the accident with the most damage. Ever the gentleman, Tinker chooses Eve over Katey even though he is truly drawn to Katey. How is this resolved? Oh, you have to read the book to find that out.

Along the way you will be absorbed in the manners of the time. For example, this was and era when gentlemen were gentlemen, as my dad would say. Tinker conducts his life as a great gentleman might, taking his lead, and furnishing the book's title, from George Washington's "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior," the 110 maxims of conduct the future leader copied when he was 16 from a 16th-century set of precepts compiled by French Jesuits.


Clearly, Towles is having great fun diving into the habits of the period, the food, the dress, the rituals. I get the sense that he had as much fun writing the book, celebrating the glories of the time, as the reader does in devouring it. "To begin, Wallace ordered aspic, of all things, and I had the house salad -- a terrific concoction of iceberg greens, cold blue cheese and warm red bacon. If I were a country, I would have made it my flag."

Towles' Manhattan owes more to fiction than history, the gift of invention, or reinvention, that you could get ahead by bending truth and breaking rules. (Like "Mad Men," decades later.) His characters speak not so much as people might, but how we wish they might. Katey and Eve and all Katey's smart friends at work banter much as the bright women of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman's "Stage Door."

"But in general, investments that need their own food and shelter don't amount to much," Tinker's icy, glamorous godmother observes. It's not altogether clear she's speaking about horses.

"Rules" is populated by men named Val and Wallace, and women named Wyss and Bitsy. I didn't mind. There's something greater going on than the arthritic rules of the entrenched upper class. Just as I adored Tom Rachman's "The Imperfectionists" last year, "Rules of Civility" is the book that I've been waiting to read, a gift for the summer. It's the kind of charmer you can't wait to share with other people, as you might any delicacy, saying, "Here, enjoy."