
From Amor Towles, the critically acclaimed author of A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway, comes Table for Two, a collection of six short stories set in the 2000s in New York City and a novella taking place in 1930s Los Angeles.
The six short stories highlight diverse quirks and foibles of human behavior. In the Hasta Luego (See you Later), the story is told by an unnamed traveler who is stranded overnight in an airport hotel during a snowstorm. There he meets a “very nice, friendly, and sociable fellow” who also turns out to be a “raging alcoholic.” In I will Survive, a 68 year old second husband deceives his “society” wife about his Saturday gentlemen’s squash games so he can secretly pursue a youthful passion for roller skating around the Central Park fountain dressed in outrageous costumes.
In The Bootlegger, a wife recounts her husband’s idea to attend a concert at Carnegie Hall more as an affirmation of his social position and business success, rather than out of love of music. When the husband suspects that the old man sitting next to him secretly tapes the concert, he becomes consumed with righteous indignation against the “bootlegger.” The irony of the story is that at the end, the wife is the one who enjoys the music, while it’s beauty is completely lost on her husband who is fully consumed by fury.
In the Ballad of Timothy, a young man dreams of becoming a “celebrated novelist” but struggles to find a subject for his future novel. He blames his “predictable, uneventful” life lacking the “true tragedies, or hardships” that inspired great writers to create their timeless masterpieces. When the young man succumbs to a Faustian bargain, he easily puts “on hold” his dreams of becoming a famous writer in exchange for a comfortable apartment, expensive clothes, and dining at the best restaurants. In the end however, the young man gets his wish, but it’s not what he imagined.
The Line, a story vaguely redolent of A Gentleman in Moscow, starts in the post-revolutionary Moscow and unexpectedly winds up in the middle of the New York’s Time Square. The story features a poor Russian peasant who happily worked the land all his life, but who finds new purpose when he is thrust amidst the new “proletarian” Moscow and ruled by absurd rules of the communist regime.
In the last short story, The DiDomenico Fragment, the author recalls events from his own family when his grandfather cuts full size portraits of his ancestors to a smaller size in order to fit them in a dining room. The story narrator is one Mr. Skinner, an older gentleman retired from a successful career at New York’s Sotheby Auction House. Upon learning that an unknown art collector wants to buy fragments of the DiDomenico’s Annunciation painting, Skinner, whose family has inherited small fragments of the painting through several generations, tries to “outsmart” a shifty art dealer.
The main protagonist of the novella Eve in Hollywood, is Evelyn Ross, a character from Towles’ earlier work Rules of Civility. An attractive young blonde, Evelyn boards a train from New York to Chicago, intent on traveling back home to Indiana. When the train arrives to Chicago, Eve changes her mind and extends her ticket to Los Angeles.
In the dining car Evelyn strikes up a conversation with Charlie Granger, a widowed retired LA police officer, when the two share a table. In Hollywood, Evelyn befriends Olivia De Havilland, a talented young movie star who plays an important part in the soon-to-be-released Gone With The Wind. When Olivia is blackmailed by unknown villains, Eve enlists Charlie Granger and Prentice Symmons, a former movie star and a permanent guest at the Bel Air hotel, to find the blackmailers and to save Olivia’s reputation. What follows next is an exquisitely written, deliciously entertaining plot that rivals the best film noir stories of 1930s Hollywood.
In Table for Two Towles delivers intricately styled, masterfully written tales of human foibles, depicted with a sense of gentle irony or sarcasm, without sounding superior or condescending. This reader could not put it down.