From Amor Towles, winning tales of deceit, desire, power
Few literary stylists not named Ann Patchett attain bestseller status, but Amor Towles makes the cut.
His three lauded novels — “Rules of Civility,” “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway” — hung around on lists for months, if not years. But Towles’s commercial brio belies the care and craft he lavishes on each piece, evidenced now in “Table for Two,” a knockout collection of six stories and a longish novella.
The book spans the 20th century, bringing characters from a range of backgrounds into tableaus of deceit and desire. Beneath his coifed prose, Towles is a master of the shiv, the bait and switch; we see the flash of light before the shock wave strikes.
This is a tale of New
York and Los Angeles, each forever tracking the other’s trends and deals. Towles devotes the first section to New York, its wealthy and famous shuffling against strivers and innocents in La Guardia terminals, musty bookstores or immigrant communities.
“The Bootlegger” depicts a woman’s epiphany after a Carnegie Hall concert. In “The Line,” a naïve Communist builds a lucrative business that steers him to Manhattan, where con games lurk. In “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,” an allegory of 1990s excess, a rare-books dealer with the Dickensian name of Pennybrook manipulates the sympathies of his young assistant, who forges autographs of eminent authors until he’s busted by one. “Hasta Luego” tells the unnerving story of an alcoholic snowbound in a Midtown bar on the cusp of the millennium; mentions of
Motorola and Nokia flip phones remind us how far away the near past really is.
But the Oscar goes to “Eve in Hollywood,” a novella that unfolds during the filming of “Gone With the Wind.” Towles tricks out the Tinseltown lore in a homage to the heyday of studio moguls and the hard-boiled fiction of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
He plucks a character from “Rules of Civility,” Evelyn Ross, who’d vanished on a Chicago-bound train, picking up her narrative as she’s traveling to California. In the dining car she meets Charlie, a retired LAPD officer who will prove to be an asset. She checks into the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she befriends an eclectic crew: a portly, has-been actor; a chauffeur with stuntman aspirations; and the rising star Olivia de Havilland.
Lithe and blond, sporting an upper-class air and a distinctive facial scar, Eve is fearless, equally at home among poolside cabanas and seedy clubs.
“From across the room you could see that no one had a leash on her,” one petty crook observes. “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 Dehavvy 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.”
When nude photos of de Havilland go missing — part of a tabloid plot — Eve vows to save her friend’s reputation. She’s a femme fatale turned inside out, matching wits amid an array of villains, including a former cop with a double cross up his sleeve. The period details are nearly airtight, although I did notice tiny anachronisms about Elizabeth Taylor and the slang term “easy peasy.”
“Table for Two” delivers the kick of a martini in the Polo Lounge, but there’s more here than high gloss. Both coasts are ideal settings for morality plays about power, as Towles cunningly weaves in themes of exploitation, an allusion to Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” a bust of Julius Caesar glimpsed by Eve on the Ides of March. Whether we’re living in the era of late-stage capitalism is beside the point; money, Towles suggests, will simply mutate, preying on the vulnerable.
“When it moves, it moves quickly, without a sound, a second thought, or the slightest hint of consequence,” he writes. “Like the wind that spins a windmill, money comes out of nowhere, sets the machinery in motion, then disappears without a trace.” It’s on us to summon our better angels.