By Luke Slattery
SHORT STORIES
Table for Two
Amor Towles
Hutchinson Heinemann, $34.99
Stendhal famously likened the novel to a “mirror walking along a high road” reflecting one moment the blue sky above, next the mud and grime below. In the fictional world of American writer Amor Towles, the mirror rarely strays from its upward orientation towards the noble floor or the swish hotel. It’s the mystique of refinement that most interests him. When the narrative focus shifts, as it does in this collection of short stories, to the low life of 1930s Los Angeles, it’s a glamorous low life with a celluloid sheen.
In Table for Two, a procession of diverting stories whose denouement is an experimental novella set in the Golden Age of Hollywood, Towles’ imaginative eye is trained on characters elevated by wealth, education, breeding, street smarts or connoisseurship – even connoisseurship put to devious ends.
In the first story, The Line, we meet Pushkin and his wife Irina, Russian peasants living on the cusp of the Bolshevik Revolution, in rather satisfied bucolic ease. The eruption of Bolshevism calls them to Moscow where Pushkin is raised by the energies of the Proletarian Age into an opportunistic though guileless street entrepreneur. Favoured by fortune, the farmer is also possessed, suddenly, with “the finest… sensibilities”.
Though Towles’s mirror is angled towards the earth fleetingly at the beginning of this tale, it’s only so that we can follow the hero’s journey upwards into a new, though not necessarily better, world. For the rest of the story collection, the mirror mostly retains its skyward tilt.
Fans will know that The Line is a riff in miniature on the core idea of Towles’s effervescent second novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. The hero of that bestseller – and a novel destined for some degree of permanency in the literary culture – is the imperturbable Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. The count is a Russian aristocrat spared by chance from the firing squad and confined to house arrest at Moscow’s esteemed Hotel Metropol: a courtly oasis striving for continuity in a society madly trampling its best traditions.
The link between Gentleman and The Line is more than simply shared historical circumstance; both stories are about characters severed from past lives: one rustic, the other aristocratic. Rostov has had a world taken from him; Pushkin leaves a world behind.
Amor Towles at his home in New York.Credit: Getty
Pushkin is cleverly deposited in Manhattan, the milieu of the subsequent five tales. Most are deftly plotted around the lives of seasoned New Yorkers; of Ivy League-educated Upper East Side lawyers, classical music lovers, and European Old Master collectors; of Central Park, Carnegie Hall, the Met.
Table for Two’s second half is a novella, circling around the adventures of Evelyn Ross. A character resuscitated from Towles’ much-loved New York novel, Rules of Civility, Eve is a high-spirited young woman with a distinctive scar on her cheek courtesy of a car crash.
We’re in the 1930s, the Golden Age of Hollywood, but also of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and Towles does a fine job of channelling the jaded yet jivey patter of the shady sleuth and the femme fatale: “So this blonde from nowhere must have had the boys from the studios tearing their hair out. Even from across the room you could see that no one had a leash on her. With the narrowed eyes of a killer, she was sussing out the place, and she liked what she saw. She liked the band, the tempo, the tequila – the whole shebang. If Dehavey was bandying about with the likes of this one, you wouldn’t have long to wait for the wrong place and the wrong time to have their tearful reunion.”
Dehavey is Olivia (Gone with the Wind) de Havilland and the blonde with the killer eyes is none other than the shrewd Evelyn Ross, who is about to give her own take on those beloved film noir tropes.
It would be easy to submit to a soupcon of cynicism over Table for Two. Eve in Hollywood, though a masterclass in fictional narration and point of view, is a reheated version of the talented Mr Towles’ second book, published under this title in 2013. And then there’s the serendipity of the publication date, seemingly to chime with the first episodes of the streaming adaptation A Gentleman in Moscow.
Despite its fragmentary nature and the sense one has occasionally of watching Amor Towles do Amor Towles, the collection coheres around a distinctive – and alluring – fictional world. Towles is not a heavily moralistic writer, yet many of these tales can be read as subtle commentaries on human foibles and injustices. Or, as one of the characters in Eve so aptly puts it: “Every story has a moral … but most have more than two.”
The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.