Did you know there actually is a book “The Young George Washington’s Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation” that people studied in the turn of the 19th century? The 110th rule states, “Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience”.
I love the brilliance, the choice of words and style of this writer. I recently read Amor Towels’ “A Gentleman in Moscow” and was excited to start “Rules of Civility”. All set in NYC and my hometown of Long Island in the late 1930′s.
“As we sat there, dusk was falling and the lights of the city were coming on one by one in ways even Edison hadn’t imagined. They came on across the great patchwork of office buildings and along the cables of the bridges; then it was the street lamps and the theater marquees, the headlights of the cars and the airplane beacons perched atop the radio towers—each individual lumen testifying to some unhesitant intemperate collective aspiration.”
On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve.
With its sparkling depiction of New York’s social strata, its intricate imagery and themes, and its immensely appealing characters, Rules of Civility won the hearts of readers and critics alike.
