A look at the 30s glitterati in ‘Rules of Civility’
Having read and relished Amor Towles’ “A Gentleman in Moscow,” I picked up the first novel he published, “Rules of Civility” (Penguin Books, 2012, 368 pages) prepared to enjoy it as well. Unfortunately, some satisfying experiences elude repetition.
It’s the tag-end of 1937, and 25-year-old Katey Kontent (pronounced Con-TENT) is spending New Year’s Eve with her boarding-house roommate Eve Ross in a jazz club when they meet a handsome and apparently affluent stranger, Theodore “Tinker” Grey. Both Katey and Eve find themselves attracted to Tinker, but later in the story, after a car crash in which all three are involved, Tinker takes the injured Eve into his luxurious apartment to care for her. Soon the two are living together, with Tinker falling in love with the wild and unpredictable Eve.
Meanwhile, fate takes another turn, and Katey quits her job as a typist and secretary for a large legal firm and enters the world of publishing. Soon she’s working in the Conde Nast Building for Mason Tate, who’s intent on founding a new glamour magazine, “Gotham.” As Katey says of this change in her fortunes, “That’s how quickly New York City comes about — like a weather van — or the head of a cobra. Time tells which.”
For Katey, and for the people she meets through Tinker and through her work, the weather vane and the cobra both prove apt metaphors.
Some of the men and women who arrive and depart in Katey’s life are Tinker’s bitter brother Hank, a derivative painter; Dickey Vanderwhile, a playboy of sorts who falls for Katey — his affections are not fully returned; Wallace Wolcott, a wealthy, shy, and modest man who eventually goes off to fight for the Loyalist forces in Spain; and Anne Grandyn, an older woman who has a sexual arrangement with Tinker and who is “as sharp as a harpoon and twice as barbed.”
For some of these people and others in the book, bad decisions and deluded suppositions bring in their wake regret and ruination. 30 years later, while standing on her balcony overlooking Central Park, Katey tells us, “I knew too well the nature of life’s distractions and enticements — how the piecemeal progress of our hopes and ambitions commands our undivided attention, reshaping the ethereal into the tangible, and commitments into compromises.”
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There is much to like about “Rules of Civility.” Towles’ descriptions of the then glitterati of New York City on the eve of World War II are eye-opening, as we usually think of that time as a part of the Depression. The recklessness in living exhibited by several of the characters caught my attention, as I associate this more with the Roaring ‘20s.
An off-stage George Washington also plays a part in this novel of manners. In his adolescence Tinker acquires and takes to heart our first president’s “Rules of Civility,” which Washington copied out when he himself was a youth. Tinker makes these 110 rules his own, not the specifics of etiquette therein described, but the idea of giving consideration to all, showing respect, and playing the gentleman. To emphasize the importance of these rules to the story, Towles even includes them at the end of his novel, and they may be easily found online as well.
But there’s a difference between Washington and Tinker in the way they lived out these rules. Washington took them very much to heart, and molded not only his outward appearance but his character by their application. Tinker builds a façade from them, hiding behind appearances to make his way up the social ladder.
In this regard, Tinker strikes us as a sort of secondhand Jay Gatsby from Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” with Katey acting as that novel’s Nick Carraway, narrating and interpreting people and events.
The free flowing alcohol also calls to mind Fitzgerald’s novel. As In “Gatsby,” the drinking is incessant in this crowd, and the large parties thrown by the wealthy and the scenes in clubs and bars are often the backdrop for the action.
In addition to this resemblance to Gatsby, some other details of “Rules of Civility” are a little baffling. Would a grown man really want to go about his business under the name “Tinker?” And why does Wallace decide so suddenly to head off to the war in Spain? Unless I missed something, he’s given readers no previous hints of his political passions in that regard. I was also surprised to find that the open live-in affair of Tinker and Eve raised no eyebrows in the late 1930s. It’s a promiscuous crew, but even so surely discretion was still a watchword of the time.
Finally, with the exception of Wallace Wolcott, most of the characters for me were unlikeable, self-centered and spoiled either by wealth or ambition, even to an extent Katey Kontent.
Is “Rules of Civility” worth reading? It’s certainly a cut above most fiction written today. In terms of nuance and cohesion, however, “A Gentleman of Moscow” is by far the better book.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
