Rules Of Civility

In a jazz bar on the last night of 1937, watching a quartet because she couldn't afford to see the whole ensemble, there were certain things Katey Kontent knew:

The location of every old church in Manhattan,
How to sneak into the cinema,
How to type eighty words a minute, five thousand an hour, and nine million a year,
and that if you can still lose yourself in the first chapter of a Dickens novel then everything is probably going to be fine.

By the end of the year she'd learned:

How to launch a paper airplane high over Park Avenue,
How to live like a redhead,
How to insist upon the very best,
That the word 'yes' can be a poison,
and the Rules of Civility.

That's how quickly New York City comes about - like a weathervane - or the head of a cobra.
Time tells which.

Amor Towles has written fiction which has appeared in The Paris Review. This is his first novel. He lives in New York.