Book review: Amor Towles’ Table For Two offers well-crafted stories about how money drives people

Table For Two

By Amor TowlesFiction/Hutchinson Heneimann/Paperback/464 pages/$32/Amazon SG (amzn.to/3V0ZggG)
4 stars

Amor Towles knows money.

This understanding informs the former investment banker’s breezy best-selling novels – whether they be dealing with the excesses of the American jazz age (Rules Of Civility, 2011) or aristocratic nostalgia in Soviet-era Moscow (A Gentleman In Moscow, 2016).

For the native Bostanian-turned-New Yorker author’s forte is in plumbing the depths of human decency as his characters negotiate the vagaries of economics.

In his latest, Table For Two, a short-story collection yoked to a novella, Towles again examines, in his inimitable, elegant way, the capitalist cogs that drive people.

The Line, which opens the book, is a modern fable of a Russian farmer who reluctantly leaves his beloved rural home and winds up creating a new business model by standing in queues.

The Ballad Of Timothy Touchett is a Dickensian tale of literary forgery, a la real-life convicted autograph forger Lee Israel, with a protagonist as naive as Pip from Great Expectations.

Another short story, The Didomenico Fragment, taps the author’s knowledge of the art world, inheritance and Manhattan manners to weave a caper involving a fictional Renaissance painting.

All the stories involve racketeering of some sort or other, even if the perpetrators are more likely to be in dinner jackets than prison jumpsuits.

What they have in common are a propensity for greed and an enjoyment of innocuous luxuries – a good steak dinner, a more spacious apartment or respect from one’s relatives and peers, for instance. And if money – which, in one character’s opinion, comes and goes like the wind – is the means to the end, then so be it.

In Towles’ confident hands, this material becomes gold. The prose is of good, robust, old-fashioned construction – reminiscent of Chekhov and Jeffrey Archer.

And while decidedly of a white upper-class bent, perfumed with a subtle whiff of racism, the characters are often sophisticated enough to recognise that they are sometimes – okay, often – the a******s.

Case in point: In The Bootlegger, a kerfuffle over an old man’s clandestine recording of a Bach sonata in Carnegie Hall eventually leads a society wife to reflect that her Goldman Sachs investment banker husband – as close a stand-in for Towles as ever, perhaps – has missed the point about the finer things in life.

Perhaps the weakest link here is the novella, Eve In Hollywood, which picks up the story of a tragic character in Towles’ first novel, Rules Of Civility.

The reader picks up the story of Evelyn Ross, a mid-western society beauty, after she disappears from New York while on an Indiana-bound train. Eve winds up in Los Angeles, taking up residence in the Beverly Hills Hotel and falling in with Tinseltown types. When a blackmail plot threatens the career of a new friend, Eve – scarred and indomitable – swings into action.

Something feels a little half-baked about this novella, which is narrated by a revolving door cast of characters. Eve herself remains a bit of a wayward enigma and the denouement lacks the tautness of the best gumshoe noir.

As a piece of alternative Hollywood history, Eve In Hollywood pales a bit in comparison with Singaporean writer Amanda Lee Koe’s Delayed Rays Of A Star (2019) or American writer Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents (2022). Still, this entertaining fragment boasts Towles’ eye for historical detail.

His writing punches well above its weight in this TikTok-era of disposable memes.

Author Amor Towles’ forte is in plumbing the depths of human decency as his characters negotiate the vagaries of economics. PHOTO: DMITRI KASTERINE

There is something comforting about reading a sentence as well-crafted as this: “She rose to put Marcus’s piles of paper in their proper spots, taking the time to delicately true the edges of each stack with the palms of her hands.”

With writing this assured, it is easy to buy into the fantasy of Hollywood glamour, upper-crust mores and interior lives of the rich.

If you like this, read: Anthony Marra’s Mercury Pictures Presents (Hogarth/John Murray, 2022, $18.71, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/4dGBvC4), about the rise and fall of a fictional Hollywood movie studio, as Nazism rears its ugly head in Europe.