Book Review
Table for Two
by Amor Towles
The television adaptation of Amor Towles charming bestseller, A Gentleman in Moscow, has just started streaming. I’m not sure how it will translate, for Towles’ writing exhibits a style and panache that sits so comfortably on the page. These skills are ably reflected in Table for Two, a collection of short fiction and a novella.
Those who love A Gentleman in Moscow will be delighted by the first story, ‘The Line’, set in revolutionary Russia where the charming yet hapless protagonist, Pushkin, stumbles on a way to deal with the privations of the revolutionary state. Towles then moves to New York where, in four stories, a series of characters navigate an intriguing set of ethical and practical problems. The characters jump off the pages fully formed, beguiling and fascinating the rarefied world of upper-class, though slightly shabby, New York. Fresh-faced Timothy Touchett moves there from Boston to “become a writer”, where he is thrilled to be sharing an apartment with an aspiring actor and a dancer. The direction of his writing becomes lucrative, but certainly not creative. In another story, two passengers stranded at the airport by a snowstorm find their lives briefly entwined.
The final section of the book is a novella, ‘Eve in Hollywood’, set in Los Angeles in the ’30s. Here Towles reprises Evelyn Ross, a character from his earlier novel Rules of Civility. Towles evokes the Hollywood of Chandler and Hammett with a cast of characters and a plot that will delight. Eve is smart, sassy and principled, a rare combination in Gone with the Wind-era Hollywood; as she saves the young actor Olivia de Havilland from scandal, she moves through the seedy side of Hollywood that lurks just below its wholesome Tinseltown image. This book is 445 pages of stylistic pleasure.
