The novel is Amor Towle’s first, and it’s a most impressive
debut. Written in the first person, it’s
a story told, mostly in flashback, by Katie Kontent. As the novel
opens, Katie and her husband are touring an exhibition of photographs
taken on the New York subway in the 1930s.
The subway riders wear faces of urban boredom, which is the point. Katie thinks one of the faces is familiar,
then she sees him again in another photograph.
Now she is sure: It is Tinker
Grey. Her husband confirms it, Katie’s
memory takes over, and the novel is launched.
This is a New York novel, with more than a hint of Scott
Fitzgerald and the New York novels of Dawn Powell. Manhattan in the late
30s. Most of the characters are well
insulated from the Depression, privileged people with pieds-a-terre in
Manhattan and big homes on Long Island.
Katie is a working girl, most definitely on the outer fringes of
society, but she and her friend Eve parlay good looks and sharp wit to worm
their way into the inner circle. Tinker
Grey is at the center of this circle, along with various friends that inhabit
the social stratosphere.
The author is a literary stylist, and a damned good
one. A graduate of Yale and Stanford, he
is a principal of a New York investment firm.
For a male writer to channel a female memoirist is no small trick, but
Towles pulls it off convincingly.
Katie is the kind of a girl that today’s television would
build a sitcom around. She has pithy
one-liners galore, and she attracts not only men but women, who collide with
her a little too often, given the population of 1938 Manhattan. (“Katie? Katie
Kontent? Is that you?”)
The title refers to a list of 110 rules of civilized
behavior, as drafted by a young George Washington, and printed in an appendix.
(No. 65: Speak not injurious Words neither in Jest nor Earnest. Scoff at none
although they give Occasion.) The list
of rules has relevance to the plot, but I should tell you no more.
