Thoughts on ‘Rules of Civility’
I have just finished ‘Rules of Civility’, Amor Towles’s first novel — and it has already given me the opportunity to use one of the rules of grammar I learnt from it. (With possessives, the apostrophe s is used in all proper names ending in s other than Moses and Jesus.)
This book has overwhelmingly positive reviews on mostly democratic — or so I think — Goodreads, but has also received some criticism for being pretentious, dull, and unconvincing in its first person voice of the female narrator. There are comparisons with ‘The Great Gatsby’, but also backlash in Towles’s treatment of female writers. It is widely called a love letter to New York City, but there are questions over its portrayal of the late 1930s.
This isn’t a perfect book. I agree with some of the criticism above, but I must also acknowledge that I devoured the book hungrily. Several paragraphs resonated with me. What worked enormously in its favour was its setting. My knowledge of New York City being limited to what I gleaned from two short trips to Manhattan and some books, I am clearly not qualified enough to read Towles’s depiction of the city as critically as millions of other people. However, I was delighted to have an opportunity to revisit Manhattan and Brooklyn.
To me, Towles’s protagonist seemed very convincing — I felt her longing and her solitude verging on loneliness, her aspirations and her confusion. Despite her cutesy name, Katey Kontent spoke to me, to the spirit I never was and never will be, but one that insists on lurking under the carefully cultivated exterior that knows not to shock or scandalise. It spoke to the part of me that adores the glittery messiness of New York City, my fleeting acquaintance with it notwithstanding, for I can easily pretend that I have known it all my life. Why, I even have my favourite nooks in Central Park.
I loved the people that Katey loved, and despised those that hurt her. I really liked that she chose to read whenever she had the chance — eating lunch in the park, waiting for a train, commuting on the subway.
‘It is a lovely oddity of human nature that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book, even if it is a foolish romance…’
(I have used this “oddity” to good effect, though times are not what they used to be.)
The book focuses on Katey’s rise from a working-class background into elite circles, thanks to friends, acquaintances, and people with whom her relationship cannot be easily defined. They are mostly well-heeled white people frequenting every conceivable kind of party and going on vacations in the Riviera. Katey, while rapidly gaining acceptance in these circles, is also conscious of her past, and alludes frequently to her immigrant father. When she comes into some money and treats herself to a birthday dinner, she reflects on how her behaviour is different from her father’s:
If my father had made a million dollars, he wouldn’t have eaten at La Belle Époque. To him, restaurants were the ultimate expression of ungodly waste. For of all the luxuries that your money could buy, a restaurant left you the least to show for it. A fur coat could at least be worn in winter to fend off the cold, and a silver spoon could be melted down and sold to a jeweler. But a porterhouse steak? You chopped it, chewed it, swallowed it, wiped your lips and dropped your napkin on your plate. That was that. And asparagus? My father would sooner have carried a twenty-dollar bill to his grave than spend it on some glamorous weed coated in cheese.
I would have liked to learn more about Katey’s past, about her Russian Orthodox upbringing, and how they influenced the choices she made. A little more character definition would definitely have been welcome; a gin or two fewer might have made some room for the past. There is plenty of drinking in this book and Hemingway would have been proud of it.
New York City is as large a character here as Katey — it throbs with life and imbues its residents with certain characteristics that shape their behaviour. It is heady and relentless while absorbing people from around the country and the world.
In 1936, the great French architect Le Corbusier published a little book called When the Cathedrals Were White detailing his first trip to New York. In it, he describes the thrill of seeing the city for the first time. Like Walt Whitman he sings of the humanity and the tempo, but he also sings of skyscrapers and elevators and air-conditioning, of polished steel and reflective glass. New York has such courage and enthusiasm, he writes, that everything can be begun again, sent back to the building yard and made into something still greater. . . . After reading that book, when you walked along Fifth Avenue and you looked up at those towers, you felt like any one of them might lead you to the hen that laid the golden eggs.
But there is also the sparseness of Walden to compete with such opulence.
There is an oft-quoted passage in Walden, in which Thoreau exhorts us to find our pole star and to follow it unwaveringly as would a sailor or a fugitive slave. It’s a thrilling sentiment — one so obviously worthy of our aspirations. But even if you had the discipline to maintain the true course, the real problem, it has always seemed to me, is how to know in which part of the heavens your star resides.
Perhaps it lies in the skyscrapers, perhaps in the docks. You never know until you painstakingly find this out for yourself. Towles (or Katey) accepts that the cruelty of New York exists alongside its richness. While we deplore the tendencies of others to fall victim to its temptations, we are not beyond doing so ourselves. Competition in the docks is cut-throat, much like in the Ivy League classes. And in spite of it all, the pull of the city is extremely strong.
Over the next few days, as the story simmers in my head, I know that I will nitpick and mull over why I liked it as much as I did. Yes, the plot isn’t overly original and yes, I was baffled by Towles’s (Eve’s) stance on female writers. However, it is giddy and delightful and transports you to a different era which, despite its privations, we romanticise.
The thing of it is — 1939 may have brought the beginning of the war in Europe, but in America it brought the end of the Depression. While they were annexing and appeasing, we were stoking the steel plants, reassembling the assembly lines, and readying ourselves to meet a worldwide demand for arms and ammunition. In December 1940, with France already fallen and the Luftwaffe bombarding London, back in America Irving Berlin was observing how the treetops glistened and children listened to hear those sleigh bells in the snow. That’s how far away we were from the Second World War.
It is okay to succumb sometimes, especially in a time when everything we do or say or read or write is so closely watched and commented upon; but we should know enough not to bargain our conscience away in the process.
