‘Table for Two’ an elegant collection
Opening a book by Amor Towles is like walking into your favorite fine restaurant – you know everything is going to be delicious.
So the title of his new collection, “Table for Two: Fictions,” and the jacket’s elegant black-and-white image of a well-dressed couple sipping after-dinner drinks sets just the right mood. And the six short stories and one novella within are seven courses of satisfaction.
This book shares some elements with Towles’ hugely popular 2016 bestseller, “A Gentleman in Moscow” (now a Showtime series). The six stories are set in New York City, the novella in Los Angeles, but all of them hover around the edges of upper-class luxury with their tales of outsiders and what they might do to get inside.
For the first story, “The Line,” Towles harks back to the setting of “Gentleman.” It’s a sort of fable about “a peasant named Pushkin” and his wife, who live on a farm outside Moscow. Pushkin considers himself a humbly happy man. “And,” Towles writes, “we all know exactly where that kind of happiness leads.”
As Russia turns to communism, Pushkin’s wife, Irina, turns passionately political, and he goes along for the ride – even when she announces they’re moving to Moscow. She becomes a successful apparatchik, and Pushkin discovers his aptitude for a job that brings him a surprising income in the communist economy: He stands in lines.
And when, after a series of unpredictable events, the pair land in New York City, it still serves him well.
“The Ballad of Timothy Touchett” is the sly tale of the serious young man of the title, who is sure he is destined to be a great novelist but doesn’t seem to be able to write anything. What he does have is a knack for copying the signatures of great novelists. That seems like poor solace, until Timothy meets an old man named Peter Pennybrook, who notices him in the library copying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s signature over and over.
Pennybrook is full of fascinating stories about his acquaintances with famous writers. He also owns a rare book shop, a tiny place that doesn’t turn much of a profit – until his stock of signed first editions suddenly grows.
Pennybrook overcomes Timothy’s moral qualms about the signatures by spinning stories about the deserving literary fans who will own them, and by only asking him to sign books by deceased writers. He takes it too far, though, when he asks Timothy to sign “The New York Trilogy” by the very much alive Paul Auster. “Mr. Pennybrook, it seems, knew a mother superior in Garrison, New York, who was a lover of Auster’s work, but who rarely passed beyond the walls of her nunnery.”
In “Hasta Luego,” Jerry, a business traveler, is stuck in LaGuardia during a snowstorm just before Christmas, along with throngs of other passengers.
But one man stands out, a man who “emanated an unmistakable sense of goodwill.” He calls himself Smitty, and he is soon everybody’s new best friend, helpful and cheery and ready to party. Jerry is having an unexpected blast, until he accidentally answers a call on Smitty’s phone.
The young couple in “I Will Survive” first roll their eyes when her mother, Peggy, calls with a request. Peggy wants her daughter, Nell, to follow Peggy’s husband, John, because she’s sure he’s having an affair when he’s supposed to be playing squash on the Upper East Side.
Nell and her husband, Jeremy, the story’s narrator, are sure John (who is Nell’s stepfather) isn’t that kind of guy. What Nell discovers when she comically tails John to Central Park is something entirely different, and wondrous.
Another young married couple is at the center of “The Bootlegger.” We meet them already in their very good seats for a classical concert in Carnegie Hall. But Tommy, the husband, is fidgety, his wife tells us. The source of his discomfiture soon shows up, excusing his way down the aisle to a seat next to theirs: an old man in a raincoat.
He’s polite, and once seated not at all disruptive. But Tommy has been furious at him since he noticed, several concerts before, “that protruding from the sleeve of the old man’s raincoat were two black rods extending in a Y, like the antennae of an insect.”
The old man is secretly recording the music, and Tommy, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, won’t have it. His wife prefers to take a more merciful view, but both of them will discover the situation is much more complex than it appears.
“The DiDomenico Fragment” is a wonderfully witty and twisted tale about Percival, a retired art appraiser who is feeling the squeeze of his fixed income. When he’s approached to help make a perhaps not entirely aboveboard deal for a collector, he finds the commission hard to resist.
His connections are impeccable: Thanks to one of Percival’s eccentric ancestors, the piece of art in question (and it is just a piece, a scrap of a larger painting) belongs to his nephew, Peter.
He knows Peter can use the money. And Percival can use his share of it. But there’s another family member, “a nine-year-old boy dressed like T.S. Eliot,” who might really be running the long con.
The novella, “Eve in Hollywood,” jumps to the opposite coast in the 1930s and shifts from the breezy tone of the stories to a style that’s next door to noir.
Fans of Towles’ 2012 novel “Rules of Civility,” set in Greenwich Village, might remember an intriguing character named Evelyn Ross.
She disappeared from that novel, but Towles picks her up in this story, riding a train to Chicago and then changing her ticket to Los Angeles at the last moment.
Eve is a confident blond beauty with a patrician air and a shocking scar that blazes across one side of her face. If her ambition was to become a star, she wouldn’t have a prayer, but she sees other opportunities in Hollywood in the late 1930s.
She moves into the Beverly Hills Hotel and makes several new friends, including Prentice Symmons, a once-popular actor done in by his fondness for food; Billy, an eager young guy who wants to be a stuntman; and Charlie, a retired L.A. cop with time on his hands.
Most significantly, she makes friends with fellow guest Olivia DeHaviland, who is currently filming her role as Melanie in “Gone With the Wind” after fighting her studio, Warner Bros., tooth and nail to let her make a movie with another company.
Eve is there the day Olivia gets a plain manila envelope, delivered to the front desk by a messenger. In the envelope are two photos of Olivia, looking calmly into the camera, and totally naked. The worst part: She has no idea when or where they were taken, even given the unusual jungle-themed wallpaper behind her in the shots.
These days naked photos of a celebrity are likely to evoke a shrug and a wisecrack about AI, but 90 years ago they could burn a career to the ground. Terrified Olivia has no idea what to do – but Eve does, and following her furious revenge is an icy delight.