Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Do you recall a time, however brief, when some people, some places and you seem to converge with a sense that something special was happening that could go on and on? And yet, you were so caught up in the effortless unfolding of events that you were unaware of the magic until it was gone. Amor Towles’ 2011 novel, “Rules of Civility”, is his homage to 1938 Manhattan, its environs and a few youthful inhabitants. It blends sly humor with engaging discovery about each other and themselves. And leaves at least one mystery unsolved. The story is related through the eyes of a young, scrambling woman in her twenties from Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach starting her career in a Manhattan law firm secretarial pool and living with similar women in Mrs. Martingale’s boardinghouse. It is New Year’s Eve 1937 as Katey Kontent and her roommate, Eve Ross, meet a handsome, affluent-looking, not-for-long stranger at a Greenwich Village jazz club. They quickly exchange names and his is Theodore Grey, though “My friends call me Tinker.” And Tinker it is for the rest of the tale. Towles presents a wonderful sense of Manhattan as a feast for excitement and adventure from the Village to Midtown, including the original watering hole of the St. Regis Hotel’s King Cole Room with the fabled Maxfield Parish mural, to uptown apartment suites overlooking Central Park West. And it seems like the Great Gatsby has met the Gold Diggers of 1938. Events move quickly and the circle of friends and acquaintances swells to include other denizens of Gotham and the tippling affluent described with Art Deco wit: “Slurring is the cursive of speech, I said. Eckshactly, he said.” And one of my favorite tell-all exchanges captures the initial sense of the story: “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, I said… Kay-Kay, those are my six favorite words in the English language.” Through the four seasons of 1938 Katey expands her horizons and moves from the world of law to the intense, demanding realm of society magazine publishing for which she seems better suited. And her friends shift their courses, including Tinker for whom Katey will always have a sense of tristesse but no regrets. The opening ploy is a brilliant use of pictures at a 1966 exhibition Katey and her husband are attending. It is here she sees two black-and-white photographs of Tinker taken at different times with a hidden camera. And the door opens to her memories, which we come to share. “The Rules of Civility” is sunlight on moving water, glistening at first, then, the sun moves on and we are left to savor a fading glimmer.