I began listening to this audiobook just yesterday during my morning commute. While it is way too early for such pronouncements, Rules of Civility is a story so beautifully told—so elegant, so effortless—it may well be The Novel, perfected.
I want to be there in New York with Katey and Eve in 1937. First, this:
That New Year’s, we started the evening with a plan of stretching three dollars as far as it would go. We weren’t going to bother ourselves with boys. More than a few had had their chance with us in 1937, and we had no intention of squandering the last hours of the year on latecomers. We were going to perch in this low-rent bar where the music was taken seriously enough that two good-looking girls wouldn’t be bothered and where the gin was cheap enough that we could each have one martini an hour. We intended to smoke a little more than polite society allowed. And once midnight had passed without ceremony, we were going to a Ukrainian diner on Second Avenue where the late night special was coffee, eggs, and toast for fifteen cents.
But a little after nine-thirty, we drank eleven o’clock’s gin. And at ten, we drank the eggs and toast. We had four nickels between us and we hadn’t had a bite to eat. It was time to start improvising.
And then they meet the handsome young banker, Tinker Grey, and head out into the night.
Powdered with snow, Washington Square looked as lovely as it could. The snow had dusted every tree and gate. The once tony brownstones that on summer days now lowered their gaze in misery were lost for the moment in sentimental memories. At No. 25, a curtain on the second floor was drawn back and the ghost of Edith Wharton looked out with shy envy. Sweet, insightful, unsexed, she watched the three of us pass wondering when the love that she had so artfully imagined would work up the courage to rap on her door. When would it present itself at an inconvenient hour, insist upon being admitted, brush past the butler and rush up the Puritan staircase urgently calling her name?
I am lost to this book already, aching to dive in and swim there a while among its perfect sentences. There is so much to savor.
Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles. A first novel by this principal at an investment firm in New York whose only other published work is a short story cycle, published in 1989. Wow.
This book stays in my head as well. It’s was so hard for it to be over.
“I lit a cigarette and then I threw the match over my shoulder for good luck thinking: “Doesn’t New York just turn you inside out.”