Table for Two by Amor Towles
Rating: 90/100
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Amor Towles is best known for A Gentleman in Moscow, the fictional account of a Russian aristocrat imprisoned in a high-end hotel by the Bolsheviks. A Gentleman in Moscow has a fast pace, sharp dialogue and terrific humor, and it is no surprise that it appears on many “Best Books of XYZ” lists.
By comparison, I found the short stories in Table for Two more polarizing. Some (“Hasta Luego”, “The Bootlegger”, “Eve in Hollywood”) were excellent. Others (“The Line”, “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett”, and “I Will Survive”) were disappointing.
Towles’s best characters - such as Count Rostov in A Gentleman in Moscow and Eve in a Table for Two - are flawless. Like the heroes of your favorite action flick, they overcome every obstacle with flair. Eve is so far ahead of everyone around her that she outwits them, charms them, and astonishes adversaries by appearing exactly where she needs to be. Towles makes Eve perfectly attractive as well. Her only imperfection as a noticeable scar on her face as though to qualify this absurdity.
Towles doesn’t always bend to the standard that characters must suffer in “good” fiction. Flawless characters are fun. And Eve’s combination of kindness, omniscience, and dominance is even better in print than it would be on the screen, capering for 200 pages in Table for Two across 1930s Los Angeles.
This makes some of his other stories so much less appealing. In “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,” Towles expresses an oozing disdain for inept writers. The same disdain appears in different guises for the characters in “The Line” (about a passive, good-natured Russian farmer) and “I Will Survive” (about an interfering Upper East Side daughter). And when he writes about people whose failings lead to tragic ends, he can’t hide his enthusiasm for punishing human weaknesses. Some people might like it, but I find this artless.
Towles is better off when his characters have sympathetic flaws (“Hasta Luego” and “The Bootlegger”). In both of these stories, the protagonists are married to spouses who love them anyway. And, as though depicting that love makes him more tolerant, Towles produces more moving stories.
Table for Two is easy to recommend. Every story was entertaining. And “Eve in Hollywood” was both the best and the full second half of the book. The familiar scenes from Central Park to Brooklyn to LaGuardia Airport were fun to have so well-captured by a local author, and sun-bleached LA was equally vibrant.