Rules of Civility

Rules of Civility is Amor Towles's 2011 debut novel, the literary commercial breakthrough that established Towles for the broader contemporary American literary commercial audience before A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) and The Lincoln Highway (2021). The structural premise is Katey Kontent, a twenty-five-year-old working-class Manhattan secretary at a downtown law firm, who on New Year's Eve 1937 meets a charming Wall Street junior banker named Tinker Grey at a Greenwich Village jazz club with her roommate Eve Ross. The novel runs across the next year of Manhattan society (1938), with Katey's relationship with Tinker, her relationship with the older publisher Mason Tate, her career move from secretarial work to a Conde Nast junior position at the magazine Gotham, and her gradual understanding of who Tinker Grey actually is across the rest of the novel.

Towles's structural method is the patient first-person Katey narration across the year, with the 1938-Manhattan-society texture rendered in the kind of careful period-appropriate prose register Towles would refine across the broader catalog. The Eve subplot in the middle third (Eve's accident in Tinker's car the morning after New Year's Eve, the months of recuperation in Tinker's apartment that follow, and the structural reordering of the three-way relationship the accident produces) is the structural emotional engine of the novel. The Wallace subplot (Tinker's older brother, an active-duty Navy officer Katey meets through Tinker) provides the structural counterpoint. The novel's structural argument about class, social mobility, and the operational mechanics of late-1930s Manhattan society is made through the texture of Katey's daily attention rather than through any direct argument. Most readers find Rules of Civility the right Towles entry point even now that A Gentleman in Moscow has become his canonical title.

Recommended for literary commercial readers, for fans of A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway, and as the right Towles entry point. Compare to The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's broader catalog, and contemporary American literary commercial historical fiction. The Rebecca Lowman audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.