Character studies of ladies and gentlemen, though not in Moscow

A full-length novel is very satisfying, but even short stories from such an accomplished author are too tempting to pass up. Amor Towles’ A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway were both lovely pieces of historical fiction. They have widely divergent settings — Moscow after the Russian Revolution and 1950s America — but both share a gentle, funny charm, and both are beautifully written. This collection, Table for Two contains a set of unconnected short stories set in New York as well as a novella set in Los Angeles.

Who would write a story about standing in lines? (Well, perhaps a Brit, but few American writers). The first story, The Line, starts in Moscow after the revolution, where the inefficient but kindly peasant Pushkin discovers quite by chance that his patience is monumentally useful during the hours in line for a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk.

For some of us, maybe most of us, the ticking of these minutes would have sounded like the drip from a faucet in the middle of the night. But not for Pushkin. His time in the line made him no more anxious than would the wait for a seedling to sprout or the hay to change hue. Besides, while he waited he could engage the women around him in one of his favorite conversations.

“Isn’t it a beautiful day?” he said to the [women in line]. […]

And just like that, the time seemed to pass a little more quickly.

Busy people start to pay Pushkin in food and money to wait in their place in line, and now he has found a form of employment that merges nicely with his inclinations and personality. His life is driven by chance events, and he finds himself with an unexpected visa to America. His wife leaps at the opportunity, but once in New York, they have neither money nor work. The reader is rooting for the gentle Pushkin, and so (sorry, mild spoiler) it is lovely when he finds an American line to stand in, and the reader ends up hopeful for his future.

I was sorry when Pushkin’s story ended, and it was one of my favourites along with The Bootlegger. The latter is not about alcohol, as one might think, but about an elderly man who is secretly recording a concert at Carnegie Hall. Sitting next to him is Tommy, the sort of self-important investment banker who attends concerts because it is a ‘box to be checked’, and who is incensed at the old man’s ‘theft’.

“But if we set all that aside — the copyright infringement, the violation of the law, and the instance of bad faith — at the very minimum the old man’s behavior is contrary to a universally accepted concert hall decorum.” [says Tommy, as part of a lengthily pompous analysis of the situation]

The story is told by Tommy’s wife, who thinks him insufferable at such times. All the three characters are beautifully drawn, and the ending of this story is completely satisfying.

The Ballad of Timothy Touchett is the amusing tragedy of a young author who fears he has no story to tell.

Faulkner had come of age in the Jim Crow South [..] Hemingway had driven an ambulance in the First World War before hunting lions on the African savanna. […] Dostoevsky had been sent to Siberia […] and been called before a firing squad […] How could one expect to craft a novel of grace and significance when one’s greatest inconveniences had included the mowing of lawns in the spring, the raking of leaves in autumn, and the shoveling of snow in the winter? Why, Timothy’s parents hadn’t even bothered to succumb to alcoholism or file for divorce.

Until Timothy is discovered by an antique bookstore owner to have a gift for forging signatures…

Hasta Luego is set in Towles territory, that of human connection, in this case between two men whose flights are delayed and who spend an evening together in a bar. One man is drawn into the other’s life, and starts to think about the responsibility each of us has for another human. It is well-written as expected, but struck me as a tad sentimental, and not as elegantly nuanced as Towles’ other stories.

Towles sets I Will Survive among the well-to-do on the upper East Side of New York City, where

Nell’s mother and stepfather [..] lived on Eighty-Third and Park in a grand building with two elevator banks and four doormen.

Nell’s mother suspects her husband is having an affair, but the truth turns out to be rather more charming and quite unexpected. What brings one joy, and what if that is

a joy that not only existed in [Nell’s mother’s] absence, but seemed to require it.

The novella, I fear, will be of more interest to those who have read Towles’ Rules of Civility, since it follows the main character Eve after the events described in that novel. A beautiful, bright, and independent young woman with an eyecatching scar, Eve ends up in Los Angeles, where she bumps into no less than Olivia de Havilland just before she stars in Gone With the Wind. The novella is told from multiple points of view: Charlie, an aging detective; Prentice Symmons, an overweight actor who no longer gets any roles; Olivia herself; Litsky, a paparazzo photographer; and several others. Not all the voices are equally interesting, but Towles manages to keep the focus on and around Olivia and Eve.

The novella moves unexpectedly into detective noir territory: the paparazzo has obtained a racy photo of Miss de Havilland, and another sleazeball has cameras hidden in a bathroom. Anyone who is enraged by online harassment of women with personal or faked sexualized images distributed today cannot but be cheering on Eve and the amateur team as they try to obtain and destroy the images and save Olivia’s career.

For all that, I felt less invested in the events and characters of this novella than in the shorter stories. Towles is unlikely to ever do a poor job of writing characters and atmosphere, but I think the slower and more contemplative pace of the independent stories suits his style better than the tension and twists and turns of the novella. Perhaps those readers who, unlike me, have already met Eve in Rules of Civility will care more about her story. Olivia de Havilland comes across as rather flat, and it’s hard to work up any indignation about her being passed over for roles — a situation that happens to all actors all the time, surely.

So, some gems, some middling. Even those middling ones are enhanced by Towles’ writing and sympathy for his characters, but that said, I’d re-read one of his novels before I re-read this collection.