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From the #1New York Times-bestselling author ofThe Lincoln Highway andA Gentleman in Moscow, a ??sharply stylish? (Boston Globe) book about a young woman in post-Depression era New York who suddenly finds herself thrust into high society??now with over one million readers worldwide On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society??where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve. With its sparkling depiction of New York??s social strata, its intricate imagery and themes, and its immensely appealing characters, Rules of Civility won the hearts of readers and crit… (altro)
BookshelfMonstrosity: Atonement, like Rules of Civility, paints a picture of events that instantly turn characters' worlds upside down. Also set in the 1930s, it highlights the lingering opulence of the age and how that can disappear amid tragedy.
trav: Slightly different time period and tone, but the writing is very similar as are the dynamics. Both Rules of Civility and The Glass Room are very well written time-period books.
È la notte di capodanno del 1937 all'Hotspot, un night club del Greenwich Village a New York. In fondo a una pista da ballo piccola e vuota, un quartetto jazz suona stancamente. Il sassofonista, un gigante malinconico con la pelle nera come olio da motori, sembra perso nei suoi assoli. Il contrabbassista, un mulatto dai baffi sottili, svolge ossequiosamente il suo lavoro. Ai tavoli, una clientela depressa quasi quanto il quartetto. Nessuno elegante. Qualche coppia, ma nemmeno l'ombra di un gesto romantico. Chiunque sia innamorato o pieno di soldi se ne sta dietro l'angolo, al Café Society, il night club dei ricchi, a ballare a ritmo di swing. A un tavolo appartato dell'Hotspot, tuttavia, Evelyn Ross e Katey Kontent ostentano senza problemi la loro giovanile e spensierata avvenenza. Sono arrivate lì per caso, giusto per tirarsi fuori dalla loro camera in affitto. Evelyn, bionda naturale, capelli lunghi fino alle spalle, è una di quelle tipiche bellezze del Midwest che volgono a un certo punto le spalle alla casa paterna per avventurarsi nella grande metropoli newyorchese. Katey è un'attraente giovane donna di buone letture che, per sbarcare il lunario, sbriga la corrispondenza nello studio legale Quiggin & Hale, dove
In Towles’s first novel, “Rules of Civility,” his clever heroine, who grew up in Brooklyn as “Katya,” restyles herself in 1930s Manhattan as the more clubbable “Katey,” aspiring to all-American inclusion. As World War II gears up, raising the economy from bust to boom, Katey’s wit and charm lift her from a secretarial pool at a law firm to a high-profile assistant’s perch at a flashy new Condé Nast magazine. One night at the novel’s outset touches off the chain reaction that will produce both Katey’s career and her husband, and define her entire adult life. She’s swept into the satin-and-cashmere embrace of the smart set — blithe young people with names like Dicky and Bitsy and Bucky and Wallace — with their Oyster Bay mansions, their Adirondack camps, their cocktails at the St. Regis and all the fog of Fishers Island.
If there's a problem, it's this: the parallels with Breakfast at Tiffany's are perhaps a little too overt (glamorous but down-at-heel girl falls in love with wealthy but mysterious benefactor). But that's not exactly a complaint. This is a flesh-and-blood tale you believe in, with fabulous period detail. It's all too rare to find a fun, glamorous, semi-literary tale to get lost in.
Manhattan in the late 1930s is the setting for this saga of a bright, attractive and ambitious young woman whose relationships with her insecure roommate and the privileged Adonis they meet in a jazz club are never the same after an auto accident.
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—Matthew 22:8-14
Dedica
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For Maggie, my comet
Incipit
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On the night of October 4th, 1966, Val and I, both in late middle age, attended the opening of Many Are Called at the Museum of Modern Art—the first exhibit of the portraits taken by Walker Evans in the late 1930s on the New York City subways with a hidden camera.
Citazioni
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As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion -- whether they're triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment -- if the next thing you're going to say makes you feel better, then it's probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I've discovered in life. And you can have it, since it's been of no use to me.
The 1930s . . . what a grueling decade that was. I was sixteen when the Depression began, just old enough to have had all my dreams and expectations duped by the effortless glamour of the twenties. It was as if America launched the Depression just to teach Manhattan a lesson.
It turned out to be a book of Washingtonia. The inscription on the front page indicated it was a present to Tinker fro his mother on the occasion of his fourteenth birthday. The volume had all the famous speeches and letters arranged in chronological order, but it led off with an aspirational list composed by the founder in his teenage years: Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation. . . . There were 110 of them! And over half were underlined – one adolescent sharing another's enthusiasm for propriety across a chasm of 150 years. It was hard to decide which was sweeter – the fact that Tinker's mother had given it to him, or the fact that he kept it at hand.
Squirrels scattered before us among the tree trunks and yellow-tailed birds zipped from branch to branch. The air smelled of sumac and sassafras and other sweet-sounding words.
Right from the first, I could see a calmness in you – that sort of inner tranquility that they write about in books, but that almost no one seems to possess. I was wondering to myself: how does she do that? And I figured it could only come from having no regrets – from having made choices with . . . such poise and purpose. It stopped me in my tracks a little. And I just couldn't wait to see it again.
...in Agatha Christie's universe everyone eventually gets what they deserve. Inheritance or penury, love or loss, a blow to the head or the hangman's noose, in the pages of Agatha Christie's books men and women, whatever their ages, whatever their caste, are ultimately brought face-to-face with a destiny that suits them. Poirot and Marple are not really central characters in the traditional sense. They are simply the agencies of an intricate moral equilibrium that was established by the Primary Mover at the dawn of time.
For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise – that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Sometimes, it sure seems that's what life intends. After all, it's basically like a centrifuge that spins every few years casting proximate bodies in disparate directions. And when the spinning stops, almost before we can catch our breath, life crowds us with a calendar of new concerns. Even if we wanted to retrace our steps and rekindle our old acquaintances, how could we possibly find the time?
In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions – we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.
I have no doubt that they were the right choices for me. And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss.
I caught up with the others outside, giving a little prayer of thanks to no one in particular. Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that's about as good a gift as chance intends to offer.
And yet, I found my thoughts reaching into the past. Turning their backs on all the hard-wrought perfections of the hour, they were searching for the sweet uncertainties of a bygone era and for all its chance encounters – encounters which in the moment had seemed so haphazard and effervescent but which with time took on some semblance of fate.
Ultime parole
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From the #1New York Times-bestselling author ofThe Lincoln Highway andA Gentleman in Moscow, a ??sharply stylish? (Boston Globe) book about a young woman in post-Depression era New York who suddenly finds herself thrust into high society??now with over one million readers worldwide On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society??where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve. With its sparkling depiction of New York??s social strata, its intricate imagery and themes, and its immensely appealing characters, Rules of Civility won the hearts of readers and crit
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Group Read: Rules of Civility
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A un tavolo appartato dell'Hotspot, tuttavia, Evelyn Ross e Katey Kontent ostentano senza problemi la loro giovanile e spensierata avvenenza. Sono arrivate lì per caso, giusto per tirarsi fuori dalla loro camera in affitto. Evelyn, bionda naturale, capelli lunghi fino alle spalle, è una di quelle tipiche bellezze del Midwest che volgono a un certo punto le spalle alla casa paterna per avventurarsi nella grande metropoli newyorchese. Katey è un'attraente giovane donna di buone letture che, per sbarcare il lunario, sbriga la corrispondenza nello studio legale Quiggin & Hale, dove