‘Rules of Civility’ showcases New York in the ’30s

NewYork, New York… the city is the star of this book. The year is 1938 – when coffee with eggs and toast at a diner cost 15 cents – and the central character, Katey.

We meet her with her husband of 30 years at a posh art exhibit at the Modern Museum of Art in NYC in 1966, an exhibit of photographs Walker Evans took – surreptitiously (with a hidden camera) – in the ’30s of people in the city’s subways. Reproductions of some of those photographs introduce each season of the book.

Katey gets to most parts of the city – downtown where the jazz players are; uptown, where 21 was; to the tugboats off Hell’s Kitchen; an Irish bar on Lexington; at every social visit plied with drink; shops on Bleeker Street.

A magazine editor at Conde Nast interviewed Katey by asking if she knew where the Algonquin was, or Delmonico’s; photos in his office included “a well-heeled crowd waiting in the snow outside the Cotton Club,” where waiters lit your cigarette; champagne and hors d’oevres were presented routinely. She was often wearing, of course, the little black dress.

The social strata was such that a certain group would attend certain bars where they would, of course, run into their own sort. Katey has many romances and the men are well-differentiated – but the major one, as it happened, a man the gang called Tinker, was photographed twice by Walker Evans, both of which were hung at the show Katey and her husband attend.

One showed him “ill-shaven and dirty-faced in a threadbare coat; the other shows him in a cashmere coat, clean shaven, wearing a custom-made shirt.”  Rags to riches, her husband had remarked.

“No,” replied Katey, “not exactly.”

And thereby hangs the tale.

The novel is filled with story, interaction, changing relationships; it faithfully gives off the New York atmosphere: lots of business with a lighter and cigarettes, people taking taxies everywhere. It also shows the way a character gets to the Spanish American War (which wasn’t legally declared), a speech by Franklin Roosevelt and indifference to the growing situation in Europe.

Katey waxes philosophical about life as she returns to the present (the ’60s) with her husband.

The appendix is made up of “The Young George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation” – 110 of them.

Book info:
Rules of Civility
By Amor Towles
Viking Adult, $26.95 

Posted by Rae Eastman on March 28, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry