‘Table for Two’: A Feast of Delicious Courses
Amor Towles Mixes Real-Life People and Situations in His Latest Work
When Amor Towles’ Table for Two was released earlier this year, I was leery. Over the years, he’s become one of my favorite authors. On some occasions, I’ve finished one of his novels and immediately read it again in order to figure out how he casts his spells.
However, Table for Two, was another thing altogether. Rather than a novel, it’s a collection of short prose. Sometimes when novelists release shorter work, the tales seem dashed off — as if they were pleasing some publisher that needed a fast turn-around. That’s not always the case, of course. But could readers count on a rock star novelist like Towles to avoid the trap of releasing something half baked?
The answer was more than a simple “yes.”
Have you ever read a book that seemed so good that whatever you started to read next seemed washed-out, utterly dull? You move on to other books, only to have that same experience. That was me after Table for Two.
It has qualities that are different than his novels, beyond the shorter length. Towles’ novels are set in earlier times, and he spends years digging through history to capture the essence of certain places and types of people. He introduces countless tiny details about what it was like to be an exiled aristocrat in 1920s Russia (A Gentleman in Moscow), or a witty young woman climbing the social ladder in 1930s New York (Rules of Civility).
He peoples the books with souls that seem vividly human and pique my curiosity. What they have to say can be funny or moving, depending on the moment. And there’s often more to them than first meets the eye.
REAL-LIFE SITUATIONS
The characters in Table for Two are like that as well. But Towles used a different process, sometimes borrowing from small incidences in his own contemporary life. As he explains in a Q&A on his site, he once happened upon roller skaters “dancing” to disco in New York’s Central Park. (It’s a thing.) And he became intrigued by one older, aristocratic-looking man.
“His presence seemed so incongruous I found myself wondering who he was and whether his associates or family members knew of his pastime. These are the wonderings that led to ‘I Will Survive,’” Towles explains, referring to one of the short stories.
On another occasion, Towles and his wife attended a concert, and he noticed a man recording the performance illegally. The moment in time, which he found disturbing, became the launchpad for another story, “The Bootlegger.”
While he doesn’t mention it in the Q&A, it seems likely that Towles created another story in the collection, “Hasta Luego,” after experiencing (or observing) that classic travel nightmare: a massive flight delay. In “Luego,” the story’s narrator encounters an endearing, boisterous stranger when an airport snarl leads to an unexpected night in New York — and the two characters’ relationship takes an unexpected left turn.
Here’s how the man telling the tale introduces the stranger, who’s named Smitty, when they are both waiting in a line of stranded, aggravated travelers to book new flights:
“In the midst of all this madness, all this perfectly understandable ill temper, the man standing five people in front of me emanated an unmistakable sense of goodwill. Six foot four and two hundred and fifty pounds, dressed in a loose tan suit two seasons out of season, he wore the smile of someone who was about to see his favorite Broadway musical from the best seats in the house. He seemed to have a gentleness that belied his size. As I watched, he turned and lowered his head in order to say something to the older couple behind him, who were each holding long rectangular boxes wrapped in the spirit of the season. When the couple began to laugh, he adopted a look of surprise, as if he hadn’t realized that what he’d said would be funny; but then he started laughing, which prompted the woman in front of him to start laughing too.”
It would be hard for me not to be curious about someone like that.
AUDIO BOOK PERFORMANCES
There’s an added bonus, if you listen to the audio version of Table for Two. The highly acclaimed performer Edoardo Ballerini captures Smitty’s voice in a way that seems so true to who he is. Ballerini does that for so many other characters in the book. Another excellent narrator, J. Smith-Cameron (best known as Gerri in the HBO series Succession) does the honors for one story in particular.
No matter whether Towles’ fans read or listen to Table for Two, they will quickly realize that some of the stories point back to his longer work. For example, “The Line” involves a couple of Russian peasants living at the dawn of Russia’s Proletarian Age during the early 1900s. Towles’ fascination with Russian history and the humanity that moved through it is within the DNA of both the short story as well as the more elaborate A Gentleman in Moscow.
Then there’s “Eve in Hollywood,” about a character who was a major presence in Rules of Civility. In that novel, a vivacious young woman named Eve abruptly leaves New York. Her new life is a bit of a mystery. “Eve in Hollywood” recounts what happened to her in novella form.
“Eve” begins without much of a driving agenda, as various characters — including a has-been movie star and a retired detective — find that Eve perceives glints of gold inside them at a time when few others do. Then the story clicks into a detective-yarn groove, with a 1940s Los Angeles film noir feel that includes a web of schemes that makes it hard to figure out where the story will end up. The style is markedly different than Rules of Civility — which is more of a romantic tale and reminiscent of The Great Gatsby.
FAMOUS PEOPLE
Towles also weaves real-life Hollywood icons into “Eve,” like the movie mogul David O. Selznick and Olivia de Havilland (Gone With the Wind). And he does that with some of the other short stories as well. For example, the author Paul Auster grows suspicious of a bookseller in “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett” and the cellist Steven Isserlis shows up on stage in “The Bootlegger.”
Table for Two shows us how a storyteller at the top of his game can deftly paint on smaller canvasses. It reminds me of the conniving old gent in another short story in the collection, “The DiDomenico Fragment.” The man concocts a scheme involving a wide-eyed boy and a fragment of art that was once part of a larger masterwork.
I’d never call Towles conniving, but I came away from Table a little wide-eyed. I admire not only the stories’ artfulness, but how they relate to Towles’ novels and how he creates such distinctive worlds, no matter the time period or place.
