Life in the Big City & the civil rules

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My second Amor Towles book, after A Gentleman in Moscow. This one was an audiobook that had an excellent narrator. Borrowed from the library. Ah, the writing! The style! What prose! What an all-around pleasure! Towles knows how to weave a great story, with fully fleshed-out characters, and to draw the reader in & keep them engaged. This book is, for the most part, set in New York City in 1938 towards the end of the Great Depression. Its setting, though, is among the more generally well-to-do who have doorman in their apartment complexes. It has a very F. Scott Fitzgerald feel to it.

I had no idea that the title comes from a list of 110 rules of life that George Washington kept as a young man (they are included fully in the Appendix). Towles works some of them into the story in an interesting, if not surprising, manner. Thoroughly enjoyed listening to the rhythms of Towles' prose as they rolled off the narrator's tongue. Really, a thing of beauty; not all that common. His style seemed fit perfectly for portraying the age, the clothes, the ins & outs of big city life, the twists & turns of lives that are not perfect, but messy.


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