And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The superego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into an ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades. It happens to all of us. It’s just a question of how many stops it takes.

That is Amor Towles on the experience of taking the New York subway, a couple of pages into Rules of Civility, and a sample of why this is one of the finest first novels of recent years, simultaneously a delicious historical fiction of the 1930s and a timeless coming-of-age story of a circle of gifted young people in Manhattan. It is also a highly philosophical novel, whose gravitas grows and deepens as the plot progresses.

The heroine is Katey or Katherine Kontent (one of a couple of bad name choices here), a beauty from a working-class Russian Orthodox family in Brooklyn. She’s what a Lithuanian friend of mine used to call an ethnic blonde, as opposed to a WASP blonde, and Rules portrays the combination of chance and courage that propels Katey from the slow torment of work in the secretarial pool of a law firm into a glamorous career that suits her talents.

The novel is nearly as much about her onetime roommate Eve Ross, another beautiful blonde, trying to win her independence from her wealthy Indiana family and escape a bland Midwestern culture. Rules begins as a love triangle with Katey and Eve competing for the interest of Tinker Grey, a prosperous banker with matinee-idol looks, a way with words, and a mysteriously hostile painter-brother. As the cast of characters grows, so does the novel’s moral weight.