For the first time, photographs taken by Walker Evans on New York’s subways in the late 1930’s are on exhibit. Katey and her husband Val are part of the social elite at an exhibition opening at the Museum of Modern Art in 1966. Summary: The year that changed the life of a young woman in New York, remembered when photographs trigger a flashback twenty-eight years later. It is also about maintaining integrity and the capacity for wonder in the face of insidious monetary sway, and Thoreau's exhortions to 'find our pole star and to follow it unwaveringly.Rules of Civility, Amor Towles. Towles' novel, which follows their variable romance along with Katey's ambitious ascension in a man's world, is about the randomness of chance, and how most of us 'have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options' which will determine the course of the rest of our lives. Eve calls dibs on him, although it becomes clear over the course of several high-spirited evenings that he and Katey share the deeper connection, despite what she first perceives to be their very different backgrounds. On the last night of 1937, Eve and Katey hit The Hotspot, 'a wishfully named nightclub in Greenwich Village,' where they encounter blue-eyed Tinker (Theodore) Grey, dashing in black tie and cashmere coat. Seeing these photographs sends her back to reminiscences of the year she met Grey, a turning point in her life.Īmor Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children. Among the photographs - in which Evans captured New Yorkers on the subway with a hidden camera in the late 1930s - the narrator recognizes two shots, taken a year apart, of a man she used to know named Tinker Grey. (In fact, my only other quibble with this polished book is its baffling stinginess with commas.) His starting point is the 1966 opening of Walker Evans' 'Many Are Called' show at The Museum of Modern Art, attended by his then-middle-aged, urbane narrator and her husband. Towles uses the somewhat contrived device of a long flashback to tell his story, but it works. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton and Louis Auchincloss - Towles, a principal at a Manhattan investment firm with English degrees from Yale and Stanford, writes with grace and verve about the mores and manners of a society on the cusp of radical change.

Like the literary touchstones he evokes - F.

Rules of Civility takes its title from young George Washington's Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, all 110 of which appear in the novel's appendix. How?Īmor Towles' stylish, elegant and deliberately anachronistic debut novel transports readers back to Manhattan in 1938, just before the sharp lines between social stratifications were smudged by the leveling influences of World War II and the G.I. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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