Rules of Civility

New York, 1938

Amor Towles sets Rules of Civility in Manhattan at a very specific moment: the tail end of the Depression, just before the war, when the city’s social hierarchies were rigid enough to matter and porous enough to tempt. The novel opens on New Year’s Eve 1937, with Katey Kontent and her roommate Eve Ross sitting in a jazz club in Greenwich Village with almost no money between them. By the time 1938 ends, both of their lives will have been irreversibly altered by a single encounter.

Towles is meticulous about period atmosphere without being nostalgic. The Manhattan he renders is not a golden-age fantasy. It is a city of deliberate social performance, of restaurants where the right table announces you and the wrong one diminishes you, of apartments that signal everything and secretaries who are expected to signal nothing. Katey moves through this city with the sharp attention of someone who understands its codes without being entitled to its rewards. The period detail accumulates — the price of a martini, the etiquette of a telephone call, the significance of a particular address — in service of a portrait of a society whose civility is inseparable from its cruelty.

Katey’s Voice

The novel’s principal achievement is Katey herself. She is a secretary from Brooklyn, the daughter of Russian immigrants, educated beyond her station and aware of it. Her narrative voice is the instrument Towles tunes the entire novel around: dry, precise, occasionally caustic, and morally serious without ever announcing its seriousness. She observes the world of the wealthy with the clarity available only to someone who is in it but not of it.

What distinguishes Katey from the more familiar bright-young-woman protagonist is that she is rarely self-deceived. She understands what she wants and why she wants it, understands the costs involved in the wanting, and proceeds anyway with open eyes. This makes her a companion worth spending a novel with. Towles gives her a literary intelligence — she reads widely, thinks about what she reads, and uses literature as a lens on the social world she is navigating — without making her a type. She is specific in the way that only the best-drawn fictional characters are specific.

Tinker Grey and Eve Ross

The two people who define Katey’s year are Tinker Grey and Eve Ross, and they are constructed as near-perfect foils. Tinker is handsome, wealthy, and unexpectedly kind — a man from the patrician world who seems to possess none of its habitual contempt. Eve is Katey’s roommate and best friend, a midwestern beauty whose ambition is less guarded than Katey’s and whose relationship with Tinker becomes the novel’s central complication.

What Tinker represents is the seductive promise of the class just above you: the idea that there are people at the top who are genuinely better, not just richer, and that proximity to them means proximity to something worth having. The novel disassembles this illusion carefully and without melodrama. Tinker is not a villain. He is something more interesting and more troubling — a good man whose goodness operates within limits he has never been required to examine.

Eve, meanwhile, is the character the novel treats most complexly. Her arc is devastating in a quiet, accumulated way, and Towles is careful not to render it as either cautionary tale or tragedy. What happens to Eve is presented as the logical outcome of a particular combination of ambition, beauty, and circumstance — and the novel’s refusal to moralize about it is one of its most notable qualities.

Towles in Context

Rules of Civility is Amor Towles’s debut, published in 2011, and it arrived without the fanfare that would attend his second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), which became one of the defining word-of-mouth literary bestsellers of the decade. Reading backward from A Gentleman in Moscow to Rules of Civility reveals a writer whose preoccupations are consistent: the relationship between elegance and constraint, the way social form both limits and enables personal dignity, the intelligence of characters who are observers rather than actors.

The comparison between the two novels is instructive. A Gentleman in Moscow is more formally inventive and more overtly charming — the premise of a man confined to a luxury hotel for decades generates a kind of productive pressure that the more open-ended social world of Rules of Civility cannot quite replicate. But Rules of Civility has something A Gentleman in Moscow occasionally sacrifices for warmth: a harder moral edge, a clearer-eyed account of what social ambition actually costs.

The novel has also attracted comparison to The Secret History and what has been loosely called the dark-academia genre — literary fiction organized around a rarefied social world that contains a secret cruelty. The comparison has some validity. Both novels are narrated retrospectively by someone who has survived a formative year among the wealthy, and both are interested in the seductiveness of a world the narrator knows, on some level, to be dangerous. But Rules of Civility is less gothic and more sociological, less interested in the transgressive event than in the texture of daily social performance. It belongs on the same shelf, but it is its own thing.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A debut of unusual confidence, built on one of the best narrative voices in contemporary literary fiction and a portrait of 1938 Manhattan that earns every comparison to Fitzgerald it receives.

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