BookBrowse Reviews Table for Two by Amor Towles

BookBrowse:

A stellar collection of six short stories, most set in New York, plus a novella, "Eve in Hollywood," set in late-1930s Los Angeles, that reintroduces a character from Amor Towles's first book.

Amor Towles's short story collection Table for Two reads as something of a dream compilation for those of us who have dearly wished we could spend just a bit more time in the company of his characters and in the fully imagined settings of his novels Rules of Civility (2011), A Gentleman in Moscow (2016) and The Lincoln Highway (2021). It appears that the author may have felt that way, too.

Although we get just a short whiff of the Moscow location of Towles's Gentleman in Moscow in "The Line," the first of six stories that make up the New York section of Table for Two, the general sensibility, gentle humor and expert storytelling we associate with Towles and, perhaps, his greatest character, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, reverberate through all of the stories, particularly the wry first-person narrative of "The Didomenico Fragment." Here, retired art expert Percival Skinner recounts his attempt to broker the sale of a fragment of an important Italian Renaissance painting of the Annunciation. His family has increasingly mutilated the masterpiece, as each successive generation has cut it into smaller pieces to pass down equal sections to their children in an ever-shrinking inheritance. This is only one element of the story, but it demonstrates how Towles can present us with an absolutely absurd proposition in such a reasonable manner that we don't even blink as we easily visualize the dwindling artifact. In this story, as in others in the volume, readers are kept engrossed by one surprising plot twist after another; Guy de Maupassant would be proud.

The second, and perhaps more satisfying, Los Angeles section of the book contains the novella "Eve in Hollywood," which serves as a sequel of sorts to Rules of Civility and reintroduces the intrepid character Eve Ross, now busy creating a new life for herself in late-1930s Hollywood. (I will note here that the novella stands alone and will still appeal to readers who have not read Rules.)

We last heard of twenty-something Eve at the end of Rules of Civility when she left New York still reeling from a series of traumatic events. Readers were told that, on the way to her parents' midwestern home, she suddenly changed her mind and extended her train ticket to Los Angeles. Later, she was glimpsed in a photograph from a gossip magazine in the company of a "boisterous Olivia de Havilland." From these two small pieces of information, Towles has constructed his novella.

Eve ends up at the elegant Beverly Hills Hotel, where she gathers a small collection of wonderful, eccentric friends, including the charming young actress de Havilland, who has just completed her role starring as Maid Marian opposite Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood. The reader will be forgiven for again thinking of the Metropole Hotel setting of A Gentleman in Moscow. There is something about a grand hotel that Towles just can't seem to resist, and thank goodness for that. But instead of the grey Moscow skyline, Towles now harnesses the evocative setting of Los Angeles in the years just before the Second World War when Hollywood was at its peak of glamour and the jasmine-scented air felt ripe with possibility.

Of course, one can't write about Los Angeles of this period without giving a nod to the great LA writers of the era, particularly Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and Towles includes an exciting mystery subplot in which Eve gets to the bottom of a blackmailing scheme using nothing but brains, clever repartee, friends with the right skills and a surprisingly handy recipe for concocting a drug-laced Micky Finn to knock out the baddies.

The introduction of real people into the mix, such as Olivia de Havilland and the film executive Jack Warner (see Beyond the Book), works wonders to establish a strong sense of time and place, as does the snappy dialogue that feels straight out of the mouths of Nick and Nora Charles in any of the Thin Man films. In all this is a delightful group of stories to dive into, and Towles will not disappoint any of his admirers.

It should be noted that as is often the case with story collections, several of the stories have previously appeared elsewhere. I distinctly remember sitting on an airplane some years ago listening to an Audible Original recording of "The Didomenico Fragment," read by the great John Lithgow, and an earlier version of "Eve in Hollywood" was published as a Penguin special edition. But regardless of the stories' publication history, readers will still appreciate having them in a single volume for the first time.

This review first ran in the April 3, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.