I recently found myself at my dad’s house without a book. I had brought my kindle with the intention of finishing the ebook I was reading and then starting another one. The problem was my dad’s house didn’t have internet access that day, so I could only access the books that were already downloaded onto my kindle.
I did open one of those books and started reading it, but it wasn’t what I was in the mood for that day.
So I went up to my old bedroom which still has many of my brother’s books. I found this debut by Amor Towles, and since I loved his other two books (and this one is short) I picked it up and started reading.
It’s not at all what I expected.
The cover picture gave me the impression it would be about rich people in the 1920s and it’s not about either of those things.
It’s narrated by a young woman named Katy Kontent living in New York City in the late 1930s. She’s working as an administrative assistant for a law firm and living in one of the boarding houses they had for single women at the time.
She and her roommate/best friend, Eve, don’t have a lot of money, but they’ve figured out ways to get around without spending money or while spending as little money as possible.
This gets easier when they meet Tinker Grey.
Their paths cross while they’re out celebrating New Year’s Eve at a bar. Kate and Eve have a budget for how much they can spend on gin, but when Tinker joins their table (and is clearly loaded) that budget goes out the window.
He buys them more gin and champagne and Kate and Even end up conspiring (successfully) to get him to go out with them again.
Despite initially dismissing Tinker as a rich boy who’s had everything handed to him, there’s a spark between Katy and Tinker.
But Eve is the flirt and is determined to snag this rich boy for herself.
Katy is not interested in fighting her best friend over a man, so she backs off, but Tinker follows her to her office and manages to have coffee alone with her.
Eve is not happy when she hears about this, but the three of them still manage to have a pretty nice night out together. It’s not until they’re driving back from the club in Tinker’s car that things go wrong. The car hits a patch of ice, veers off the road into a light pole and flings Eve through the windshield.
She survives, but ends up with a limp and a scar down one side of her face for the rest of her life. Tinker and Katy both manage to escape with minor injuries.
Her recovery is neither fast nor easy. Tinker seem to take it as a matter of course that she’ll stay with him since he feels responsible.
The two of them end up together, and though they both try to act happy about it, it’s clear that neither of them is. Eve knows he’s only doing all this out of pity and that’s not what she wants. When he proposes, not only does she reject him, but his plans for a romantic getaway get hopelessly derailed.
Not long after that Katy gets a call because someone found Eve drunk off her ass in an alley and the only name she would say was Katy Kontent.
So Katy comes to get her and helps her dry out, pack up, and get on a train back to Illinois to live with her parents.
But instead of getting off in Illinois, she stays on the train all the way to LA, where she proceeds to make a life for herself.
Katy only hears from her a few times after that. Meanwhile, Katy herself quits her job just as she’s getting promoted, talks her way into working for a publisher starting a new magazine, and dates another guy for a while.
She and Tinker reconnect briefly, but it all falls apart due to a twist I’m not going to spoil.
I was kind of hoping she would end up with her other boyfriend, but she makes it clear from the beginning that they’re just passing time together.
It’s no spoiler that she doesn’t end up with Tinker (or her other boyfriend) because the preface and epilogue take place in the 1960s when she’s married to some guy named Val. Throughout the book, I kept looking for a guy named Val, but Towles cleverly avoids telling us his name when Katy first meets him so the reader has no way of saying, “Ah ha! There he is!” I have to admire that about Towles.
Despite the fact that this book is just as well written as his other two, it didn’t do much for me. One of the blurbs on the back compares it to Edith Wharton’s novels, and that sounds about right. That’s probably why I didn’t like it very much, because I’ve never been a fan of Wharton.
That said, Katy has more agency than the main character of the one Wharton novel I read, which is unusual. Normally female characters written by men have less agency than female characters written by women, but this book is the exception that proves the rule.