RULES OF CIVILITY

In the setup for this wonderfully told story, Katey Kontent attends a retrospective of Walker Evans photographs in the 1960s. There, amid Depression-era portraits of New Yorkers riding the subway, she is stopped by a picture of a man down on his luck. She says to her prosperous husband, “It’s Tinker Gray.” Soon we are in a vintage world ourselves, so impeccably does Amor Towles re-create Katey’s New York of 1938 as she remembers who she was then, who Tinker was to her, and, finally, what his Evans portrait really means. Rebecca Lowman has an unusually beautiful voice and inhabits and distinguishes her characters so smoothly that she seems to disappear into the story, a gift to the listener. This production is a total pleasure. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine [Published: NOVEMBER 2011]