Amor Towles flashes new skills in Table for Two
Table for Two Amor Towles Viking
Amor Towles's characters hit the page like fully sculpted marble: frank in their behaviour, obdurate in their morality and, by and large, very good-looking. In Table for Two, a collection of six short stories and a novella, Towles thrives at the crossroads of form and technique. The collection's title derives from the nature of its conflicts, most of which culminate in heated one-on-one conversation. These stories are straightforward in action but resolve at subtle ethical angles, and come divided into two geographical sections: New York City and Los Angeles. The Line, the opening story, takes place in post-revolutionary Moscow but concludes in “the middle of Times Square ...” Pushkin, the protagonist of The Line, stays in New York because he spent all his savings on ocean liner dinners while his wife lay sick in their cabin. The next story, The Ballad of Timothy Touchett, is an early high point that finds the author in uncharted territory. Towles, unlike many novelists, hasn't cast writers in primary roles. Enter Touchett, “his bachelor's degree from a well-regarded liberal arts college firmly in hand,” set on becoming “a celebrated novelist.”
Alas, the aspirant's literary heroes — William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Fyodor Dostoyevsky — led lives of wondrous adventure. Touchett's parents, meanwhile, “hadn't even bothered to succumb to alcoholism or file for divorce.”
“Oh, what crueler irony could there be,” Towles writes, “than for the gods to infuse a young man with dreams of literary fame and then provide him with no experiences?”
Towles writes a writer quite well, forcing Touchett into a Faustian bargain involving vintage books.
For a collection titled Table for Two, with a wedding ring featured on its cover, these stories aren't as conjugally inclined as one might imagine. In Hasta Luego, we're told of
“the compromises of marriage,” which “govern when, what, and how you eat.” But the marriage at stake, after a horrific day of airplane travel and some latenight shenanigans at a hotel bar, belongs to someone other than the protagonist. The same goes for I Will Survive, where we find a 68-year-old second husband lying about his squash schedule.
Towles is interested in what makes people tick. And he's most interested in the desires of those with material surplus.
The only place where Table for Two falters is in the novella that closes it, Eve in Hollywood.
The Eve of the title is Evelyn Ross from Towles's Rules of Civility, who here arrives in Los Angeles after a breakup in New York. Eve in Hollywood has strengths — it's a winsome portrait of early Los Angeles circa Gone With the Wind — but it lacks the breezy impetus that makes the shorter pieces fly.
By this point, however, Table for Two has more than delivered. This collection is not just spare pieces to tide readers over until Towles's next novel. It's a worthwhile addition to his growing oeuvre.