Amor Towles was a Wall Street banker before he published his first novel, Rules of Civility, in 2011, at the age of 46. Since then, his books have sold six million copies, and the second, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), has been made into a Paramount + series starring Ewan McGregor.
Towles’s success in banking and publishing has perhaps given him a particular insight into the American Dream. The six stories and one novella that make up his stylish and confident new collection, Table for Two, all feature characters in pursuit of an ambition that puts them in varying degrees of peril – protagonists tasked with missions of differing seriousness. There is the Russian peasant who must tell his communist wife that he has accidentally bought them tickets to New York; a forger of famous authors’ signatures; the daughter who follows her stepfather incognito to find out where he goes on Saturday afternoons; and the stranger who promises to keep an alcoholic out of a bar and get him on a plane.
In ‘Eve of Hollywood’, a character from Rules of Civility is revisited. Evelyn Ross was on a Chicago-bound train in that novel but here she buys a ticket to Los Angeles, where she arrives with a single red valise and a thirst for martinis. Previously, she was in an accident, and now her ‘marred’ beauty is much reflected upon. She was, as one man observes:
All blond and blue–eyed with a spunky little hourglass figure to boot. She wasn’t [his] type, but without the scar and the limp she would have been everybody else’s.
A kind of #MeToo story from the 1930s follows, as the actress Olivia de Havilland is blackmailed, after nude photographs are taken of her through a two-way mirror without her knowledge, just as she is about to star as the saintly Melanie in Gone With the Wind.
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