Could Rules of Civility ever match A Gentleman in Moscow? Should it?
Rules of Civility – the blurb
In a New York City jazz bar on the last night of 1937, watching a quartet because she couldn’t afford to see the whole ensemble, there were certain things Katey Kontent knew:
· how to sneak into the cinema, and steal silk stockings from Bendel’s
· how to type eighty words a minute, five thousand an hour, and nine million a year
· that if you can still lose yourself in a Dickens novel then everything is going to be fine
By the end of the year she’ll have learned:
· how to live like a redhead and insist upon the very best
· that chance encounters can be fated, and the word ‘yes’ can be a poison
· that riches can turn to rags in the trip of a heartbeat . . .
Opposites attract
For those that don’t know A Gentleman In Moscow contains possibly my favorite literary character ever. So I hesitated for quite a long time before reading Rules of Civility. I wanted my feelings about Gentleman to have subsided slightly before tackling Towles’ debut.
The two books however were quite different. Whereas Gentleman was a love letter to all things Russian this was a love letter to New York and the era in which it is set. Kate/Katherine/Katey (but never Kathy) is approaching her prime (in some ways it was almost a coming of age novel) whereas Rostov was approaching his later years. I appreciated the differences and enjoyed Civility all the more for them.
It has a bucket load of fantastic characters interlinked with lashings of literary references and New York nuggets. Towles really should become a travel agent, he clearly knows his way around New York. My mouth watered at his description of a dirty martini, I now want to learn Honeymoon Bridge and soak up some jazz in a little back street club. But a change of career would be a travesty as I love the way he writes, the countdown at Wolcott’s camp and his paragraph about how how right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallizes loss were perfect.
Rules of Civility is a beautiful book that I really enjoyed. Nevertheless I’m pleased I put the distance between it and Gentleman as even though they are quite opposite, Gentleman’s hold was strong and would have tainted Civility if I’d read it any sooner.