The manners masquerade

Manners are masquerade, something we all learned while our mothers were trying to teach us to say "please" and "thank you." You don't have to mean it to say it.

Amor Towles plays with this idea in his impressive debut novel Rules of Civility (2011). Spanning the year 1938 in New York City, the story brings together three attractive young people looking ahead to a promising post-Depression future. Our narrator, Katey Kontent, grew up in a lower middle-class family in the city, while Eve has a more well-to-do family back in the Midwest. They work in a secretarial pool.

One night they meet Tinker Grey, handsome, well-tailored and well-mannered. Eve claims him as her own, even though Tinker appears to prefer Katey. Yet when they go out at night, it is always the three of them together. Then Eve is disfigured in a traffic accident while Tinker is driving. Out of guilt, he takes responsibility for her care and moves her into his apartment, while Katey becomes more distant.

What begins with the suggestion of a love triangle evolves into something else, and this something else relates to, of all things, 110 "Rules of Civility," which George Washington studied as a young man striving to make a success of himself in the world. Tinker, too, has studied these rules, and Katey comes to realize the rules hide a different Tinker Grey. (The book includes the 110 rules in an appendix.)

Towles writes with wit, subtlety and grace while revealing that Tinker is not alone in hiding a true self behind good manners.