Review by Annabel
Until this year Towles has delighted his readers with novels of increasing thickness including A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway, both of which I adored, as well as his shorter 2011 debut Rules of Civility. By the way, if you get the chance to see the TV series of A Gentleman in Moscow starring Ewan McGregor, it was adapted brilliantly. (Streaming on Paramount+ in the UK.)
Now, in Table for Two, Towles shows he is master of the short story form too, in six short stories under the collective title of ‘New York’. In the second half of the book, these are accompanied by a short novel set in ‘Los Angeles’, which I’ll come to later.
The first short story, ‘The Line’ is mostly set in 1920s Moscow rather than in New York, and is a homage to the Russian phenomenon of queuing – a subject which has itself been the subject of many novels including Vladimir Sorokin’s 1983 book, The Queue, and Olga Grushin’s The Concert Ticket (now republished as The Line). Queuing is a full-time job for most Moscow housewives. When peasant Pushkin and his wife Irina move to Moscow, Pushkin, who is without a job, takes on the role of shopping and queuing for the bread, queuing again for the milk and so on. One day he offers to hold a place in the queue for a woman who has to be in two places at once, and so thankful is she that gives him some of her produce. This leads to repeated offers to queue for people, with gifts for Pushkin from their procured goods. All good things come to an end though, and Pushkin and Irina set off for New York and another new life – with a rather different kind of queuing at Ellis Island and beyond! The story has both humour and soul, and is a brilliant beginning to the collection.
Now we’re in New York, the next brings us back to the turn of the millennium for a story set in a bookshop, ‘The Ballad of Timothy Touchett’. A tale of forgeries, this story is made all the more delicious, yet also poignant, by the appearance of an author who was still living at the time the story was written, but died earlier this year; that being Paul Auster. Timothy longs to be a writer, but has no life experience to put into his work, so gets a job in a second-hand bookstore, where the owner finds he has a talent for forging signatures. When the bookshop owner is asked if he can get a signed set of Auster’s first three novellas, the die is thrown…
Acknowledging that Timothy normally signed books on behalf of those who could no longer sign for themselves, Mr. Pennybrook wondered whether he might consider making an exception in Mr. Auster’s case given the nature of the author’s narratives. After all, weren’t his books filled with conundrums and rebuses? With doppelgänger and ghosts? Within the bounds of this oeuvre, was there not Auster the author, Auster the character, and Auster the imposter?
As you might guess, this will lead to a sting in the tail, and a wonderful throwaway last line!
In the other stories, we have a good turn that goes wrong; an ageing mother gets her daughter to tail her father to find out who he’s having an affair with; a concertgoer gets annoyed with the old man sitting next to him secretly taping performances; and a search for the last fragment of a Renaissance masterpiece that was cut up is all about the money. They are all clever, witty, full of throwaway one-liners and, in the best short story traditions, have that way of wrong-footing the reader at the end.
Moving on to the second half of this volume, we’ve relocated to Los Angeles of the late 1930s for ‘Eve in Hollywood’. This short novel (not quite short enough for a novella at over 200 pages), was first published in 2013 – it was available as a Kindle single for a while. I downloaded it but never read it back then (I am so not an e-book person). It takes Evelyn Ross, one of the characters from Towle’s debut, The Rules of Civility, and tells us what happened after she left New York. It’s structured as a set of linked short stories, except they get increasingly linked as they go on. They begin as more discrete stories with Eve being the link, then characters recur and they become more conventional chapters rather than individual short stories.
The novel begins with a quote from near the end of Rules of Civility – Eve’s father has telephoned her best friend Katherine in New York asking if she knew why Eve didn’t get off the train to come home to Iowa as planned after her relationship with Tinker Grey had ended, but instead extended her journey to LA. They know she stayed on the train as the guard at Denver remembered her scar, which Eve had got in a car accident with Tinker.
She has, it seems, decided to escape and break all ties, be they familial or East Coast. Cut to the train’s dining car and Charlie, our narrator, a widowed former police officer, is seated across from ‘the pretty young lady with the scar’. She pointedly keeps on reading her detective novel. After a couple more meals seated opposite her reading, another woman passing by asks her if the book is any good – she has a quibble, about a Mickey that’s unrealistically fast-acting That’s the opportunity for a conversation, and ere long he’s telling her his life story, and how to make a ‘five-star Mickey Finn’. It’s a great opener, introducing us to the fascinating and confident young woman that is Evelyn Ross.
We move to the Beverley Hills Hotel and an ageing and rather rotund old actor Prentice Symmons is next to expound on the charms of Eve, as he sits in the lobby in his favourite seat people watching, and she joins him. He is delighted to be mistaken about her and the two strike up a friendship, meeting for tea in the lobby each afternoon. Prentice, with his connections, will be vital to Eve’s story later on.
The third chapter is narrated by Olivia, who is at a ‘table for two’ with her business date. She bumps into Eve in the bathroom and the two women chat about how boring he was. So when Eve decides to rescue Olivia by pretending to be an old friend, she is released, and the two women go off to have some fun. They go to the pier and get fortunes from a machine and on to a club, where Eve has to extricate her from the paparazzi. This is when Eve discovers that Olivia is an up-and-coming actress – Olivia de Havilland!
Ere long, Eve finds herself employed by the studio boss’s lawyer as Olivia’s defacto chaperone, but things take a dark turn when unposed nude photos of Olivia turn up with a blackmail demand. Eve, who by now, has made many more useful friends, will call on Charlie to help too, and between them all, they’ll get it sorted.
Eve herself only gets two chapters where she’s the narrator, one at each end of the novel’s two parts. The rest of the chapters are narrated by others, mostly, but not all by her friends. It’s a style that works brilliantly, as we get to see how they are all won over by her. It is also wonderful to have such a strong female character as the protagonist in this novel given that it’s set in the late 1930s. It is sad to be reminded that predatory males were a big part of the Hollywood machine then as now, they had no #MeToo movement to out them, that’s Eve’s job in this story, which she achieves with style and panache.
While it’s not necessary to have read Rules of Civility – which is narrated by Eve’s best friend Katherine, thus setting the style for this novel – you may get more from Eve in Hollywood if you did. To be honest, given that I read Rules on its publication back in 2011, my memory of it is quite hazy now and I’m moved to re-read it.
Towles is a superb storyteller, in short and long form. He packs drama into his narratives, yet always displays a beguiling light touch in his writing throughout that is hard to achieve and harder still to maintain. His writing always draws me in totally, and I hope it will do that for you too.
Annabel is a co-founder and editor of Shiny New Books. Her blog can be found here.
Amor Towles, Table for Two, (Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024). 978-1529154108, 451pp, hardback.
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