Any time a book I read completely absorbs me, the book that follows is going to suffer in comparison. And there's no doubt that's what happened to Rules of Civility.
But even if I hadn't read this immediately following The Guest, I'm not sure I would have known what to make of it. It's mainly the story of one year in the life of Katey Kontent, an independent young twenty-something in 1938 Manhattan who talks like a hard-boiled detective in film noir. I don’t know why, but I expected Katey to turn out to be a Russian spy. Thant unmet expectation threw me off for quite a ways through the book.
I liked it but didn't love it. I enjoyed the reading experience but wasn't swept away by it. The characters were interesting enough but I didn't live their lives with them. And it took me nine days to finish this blog post . . .
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"Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing." --M. Rivière to Newland Archer, The Age of Innocence