Tring Book Club - Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

 

How does a writer in his forties pick to write his first novel in the first person about a twenty something young woman?  He must be a genius because this book is packed full of fabulous witty prose. Katy Kontent is living the dream in New York City. She has little money and shares an apartment, but manages to make the high life courtesy of a chance meeting with Tinker Grey on New Years Eve in 1937. But it's Katy's friend Eve Ross who eventually ends up with Tinker. Evie is a "marketing assistant at Pembroke Press, promoting all of the books she so assiduously avoided at school". 

There is lots about New York, especially the bars and restaurants. Lots of chance encounters but not an awful lot of plot. But what carries the book is the writing, always sharp and clever. The book is in four sections, Wintertime, Springtime, Summertime and Fall. For me, it is that last section that makes the book the masterpiece it is. The pace seems to pick up in those last seventy pages as Katy's relationships with those characters from earlier on are resolved. Brilliantly.