In three bestselling novels over eight years, Amor Towles has established himself as one of the world’s leading novelists, exhibiting a chameleon-esque ability to inhabit vastly different settings and characters in a style uniquely his own, yet never the same from book to book

He can write elegantly and persuasively from the point of view of young women looking to make their mark in 1938 Manhattan, as he did with Rules of Civility, in which the intricacies of New York society are revealed to be as Darwinian as any jungle. With A Gentleman in Moscow, Towles transported us to 1920s Russia, where an unapologetic aristocrat is exiled to a once-grand hotel by the incoming socialist regime and eventually forced to join the ranks of the proletariat. And in 2021’s The Lincoln Highway, we follow four boys as they embark on an enthralling road trip that takes them from 1950s Nebraska to a New York City filled with danger and delight

Towles’ latest is the superb short fiction collection Table for Two. It comprises six stories and a novella

The short stories

The collection’s title derives from the nature of its conflicts, most culminating in heated one-on-one conversations. These stories are straightforward in action but resolve at subtle ethical angles, and they come divided into two geographical sections: ‘New York’ and ‘Los Angeles. The Line, the opening story, takes place in post-revolutionary Moscow but concludes in “the middle of Times Square, where the street signs flashed, the subway rumbled.” Delivered thus to Towles’s stomping grounds – he worked for about 20 years at a Manhattan investment firm and still lives in the city  – it’s in the Big Apple where the five other short stories remain

Pushkin, the protagonist of The Line, stays in New York because he spent all his savings on four-course ocean liner dinners while his wife lay sick in their cabin. “Oh,” she thinks at the American passenger terminal, “how sweet had been the notion that her husband had been transformed; that after decades of aimlessness, he had proved to be a man of purpose and imagination; and that her judgment in marrying him had not been so misguided.”

If The Line shares DNA with A Gentleman in Moscow, the following story, The Ballad of Timothy Touchett, is an early high point that finds the author in uncharted territory. Towles, unlike many novelists, has not cast writers in primary roles. Enter Touchett, “his bachelor’s degree from a well-regarded liberal arts college firmly in hand,” set on becoming “a celebrated novelist.” Alas, the aspirant’s literary heroes – William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Fyodor Dostoevsky  – led lives of wondrous adventure. Dostoevsky had even “been put on a train and shipped to the actual Siberia.” Touchett’s parents, meanwhile, “hadn’t even bothered to succumb to alcoholism or file for divorce.”

“Oh, what crueller irony could there be,” Towles writes, “than for the gods to infuse a young man with dreams of literary fame and then provide him with no experiences?”

Simultaneously, Towles cautions his peers against drawing too close to their source material. “Like parents,” he adds in an aside, rapping his knuckles on the fourth wall, “authors have no business attempting to relive their glories or redeem their sins through the lives of their creations. Authors must learn to stuff these burdens in their kit bags and lug them up the trail themselves.”

Towles largely skirts the “trail” of that most famous tête-à-tête: marriage. These stories aren’t as conjugally inclined as one might imagine. In Hasta Luego, we’re told of “the compromises of marriage,” which “govern when, what, and how you eat.” But the marriage at stake, after a horrific day of aeroplane travel and some late-night shenanigans at a hotel bar, belongs to someone other than the protagonist. The same goes for I Will Survive, where we find a 68-year-old second husband lying about his weekly squash game 

Another young married couple is at the centre of The Bootlegger. We meet them in their very good seats for a classical concert in Carnegie Hall. But Tommy, the husband, is fidgety, his wife tells us. The source of his discomfiture soon shows up, excusing his way down the aisle to a seat next to theirs: an old man in a raincoat. He’s polite and, once seated, not at all disruptive. But Tommy has been furious at him since he noticed, several concerts before, “that protruding from the sleeve of the old man’s raincoat were two black rods extending in a Y, like the antennae of an insect.” The old man secretly records the music, and Tommy, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, won’t have it. His wife prefers to take a more merciful view, but both will discover the situation is much more complex than it appears

The DiDomenico Fragment is a wonderfully witty and twisted tale about Percival, a retired art appraiser who feels the squeeze of his fixed income. When he’s approached to help make a perhaps not entirely aboveboard deal for a collector, he finds the commission hard to resist. His connections in this case are impeccable: Thanks to one of Percival’s eccentric ancestors, the piece of art in question (and it is just a piece, a scrap of a larger painting) belongs to his nephew, Peter. He knows Peter can use the money. And Percival can use his share of it. But there’s another family member, “a nine-year-old boy dressed like T.S. Eliot,” who might really be running the long con

Eve in Hollywood

Eve in Hollywood is the book’s headliner. It’s a novella that occupies half the book’s 400-plus pages and deserves every bit of that space. Its heroine, Eve Ross, will be recognisable to readers of Rules of Civility (which isn’t necessary to read first)as its Holly Golightly-esque character whose life unalterably changes when a car accident in Manhattan leaves her scarred

Luckily for us, Towles wasn’t entirely done with the enigmatic Eve. In the new story’s opening scene – one as tight and suspenseful as a Hitchcock movie – she’s on a train out of New York bound for Chicago. It’s 1938, and she plans to move back in with her parents in Indiana. But on a whim, when the conductor announces their approach to Union Station, Chicago, she decides to pay the extra fare and head to L.A. There, Eve takes centre stage amid con men, retired cops, movie studio heads and film stars, notably Olivia de Havilland, who is just being cast in Gone With the Wind

If Eve was a semi-tragic figure in her first literary outing, here she reclaims the verve and spirit of which recent events might have robbed her. Her personality shines even brighter now, but the vulnerability is gone, and in its place is an unshakable belief in her own instincts and intelligence. She becomes adept at sniffing out troublemakers, but she’s equally proficient at recognising a kind soul when she sees one

This novella has a noir feel–there’s blackmail, seedy locations, and a retired cop. It’s an ode to hard-boiled crime masters like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett but with a feminist twist. It also addresses the very relevant topic of privacy. In 1930s Hollywood, nude photos would ruin Olivia’s reputation as she’s about to take on the role of Melanie Hamilton, the biggest of her young career. One character ponders an array of nude photos of various actresses, “Fanning the pictures out, Litsky shook his head in wonder. Before him were women whose reputations were as white as their skin. Which is to say as white as snow. White as ivory. White as a pitcher of cream. It was a cash-register ringing symphony in that color without hue.” These women were marketed to the public as pure, perfect, and angelic. A hint of scandal would cost the studios too much. And once again, we’re back to economics. The flexible morality of the city when it comes to money is summed up: “For anything that was done in Los Angeles illegally could be done in Los Angeles with the full backing of the law, as long as it was set up in the right way. Because the law, like everyone else in this city, was on the payroll.”

Table for Two may be Towles’ best book yet. It is as satisfying as a master chef’s main course, filled with drama, wit, erudition and heart