Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2011 Set during the hazy,
enchanting, and martini-filled world of New York City circa 1938,
Rules of Civility follows three friends--Katey, Eve, and
Tinker--from their chance meeting at a jazz club on New Year's
Eve through a year of enlightening and occasionally tragic
adventures. Tinker orbits in the world of the wealthy; Katey and
Eve stretch their few dollars out each evening on the town.
While all three are complex characters, Katey is the story's
shining star. She is a fully realized heroine, unique in her
strong sense of self amidst her life's continual fluctuations.
Towles' writing also paints an inviting picture of New York City,
without forgetting its sharp edges. Reminiscent of Fitzgerald,
Rules of Civility is full of delicious sentences you can sit back
and savor (most appropriately with a martini or two). --Caley
Anderson
A sophisticated and entertaining debut novel about an
irresistible young woman with an uncommon sense of purpose.
Set in New York City in 1938, Rules of Civility tells the story
of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising
twenty-five-year- old named Katey Kontent. Armed with little more
than a formidable intellect, a bracing wit, and her own brand of
cool nerve, Katey embarks on a journey from a Wall Street
secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society
in search of a brighter future.
The story opens on New Year's Eve in a Greenwich Village jazz
bar, where Katey and her boardinghouse roommate Eve happen to
meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a
ready smile. This chance encounter and its startling consequences
cast Katey off her current course, but end up providing her
unexpected access to the rarified offices of Conde Nast and a
glittering new social circle. Befriended in turn by a shy,
principled multimillionaire, an Upper East Side ne'er-do-well,
and a single-minded widow who is ahead of her times, Katey has
the chance to experience first hand the poise secured by wealth
and station, but also the aspirations, envy, disloyalty, and
desires that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for
circumstances to bring Tinker back into her orbit, she will learn
how individual choices become the means by which life
crystallizes loss.
Elegant and captivating, Rules of Civility turns a Jamesian eye
on how spur of the moment decisions define life for decades to
come. A love letter to a great American city at the end of the
Depression, readers will quickly fall under its spell of crisp
writing, sparkling atmosphere and breathtaking revelations, as
Towles evokes the ghosts of Fitzgerald, Capote, and McCarthy.
Amor Towles's Rules of Civility Playlist
You can listen to the playlist here.
While jazz is not central to the narrative of Rules of Civility,
the music and its various formulations are an important component
of the book’s backdrop.
On the night of January 16, 1938, Benny Goodman assembled a
bi-racial orchestra to play jazz to a sold-out Carnegie Hall--the
first jazz performance in the hallowed hall and one which is now
famous for bringing jazz (and black performers) to a wider
audience. I am not a jazz historian, but for me the concert marks
something of a turning point in jazz itself--from the big-band,
swing-era sound that dominated the 1930s (and which the orchestra
emphasized on stage that night) towards the more introspective,
smaller group styles that would soon spawn bebop and its smoky
aftereffects (ultimately reaching an apogee with Miles Davis’s
Kind of Blue in 1957). For it is also in 1938 that Coleman
Hawkins recorded the bebop antecedent "Body & Soul" and Minton’s
Playhouse, one of the key bebop gathering spots, opened in
Harlem. By 1939, Blue Note Records was , and Dizzy
Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk were all
congregating in New York City. From 1935-1939, Goodman himself
was stepping out of the big-band limelight to make more
improvisational s with a quartet including Gene Krupa
and Lionel Hampton.
My assertion of this as a turning point (like most such
assertions) is rough, inexact and misleading, but it helps give
shape to an evolution and bring into two ends of a jazz
spectrum. On the big-band front, the power of the music naturally
springs from the collective and orchestration. In numbers like
"Sing, Sing, Sing," the carefully layered, precisely timed waning
and waxing of rhythm and instrumentation towards moments of
unified musical ecstasy simply demand that the audience
collaborate through dance, cheers, and other outward expressions
of joy. While in the smaller groups of bebop and beyond, the
expressive power springs more from the soloist and his personal
exploration of the music, his instrument, and his emotional state
at that precise moment in time. This inevitably inspires in the
listener a , a scotch, and a little more introspection.
In a sense, the two ends of this jazz spectrum are like the
public/private paradox of Walker Evans’s subway photographs (and
of life in the metropolis itself.)
If you are interested, I have created an playlist of music from
roughly 1935-1945 that spans this transition. The playlist is not
meant to be comprehensive or exact. Among other items, it
includes swinging live performances from Goodman’s Carnegie Hall
Concert as well as examples of his smaller group work; there are
precursors to bebop like Coleman Hawkins and some early Charlie
Parker. As a strange historical footnote, there was a strike in
1942–1944 by the American Federation of Musicians, during which
no official s were made. As such, this period at the
onset of bebop was virtually undocumented and thus the records of
1945 reflect something of a culmination of early bebop rather
than its starting point. The playlist also reflects the influence
of the great American songbook giants (Cole Porter, Duke
Ellington, Irving Berlin, Rodgers & Hart, the Gershwins), many of
whom were at the height of their powers in the 1930s. --Amor
Towles
Listen to the playlist
