We Touch Each Other

Table for Two by Amor Towles

Another month, another episode of Something We Read, the podcast hosted by me (Eve) and my older sister (Kathryn). She and me together make up the we, and we read one book a month. Well we read more than that, but we read one book a month together, and then get together to talk about it on our podcast, Something We Read. This is the third episode, which makes three months in a row, which is nothing to shake your boots at, or whatever colloquialism suits you. I just made that one up.

Our selection for this month was Table for Two by Amor Towles, which turned out to be a delightful collection of short stories, the seventh of which is just about as long as the first six combined. That last one is a follow-up of sorts to Towles’s first book, Rules of Civility, which I read and loved, but don’t remember terribly well, as I was in the throes of covid at time of reading. You do not need to read Rules of Civility to enjoy the quasi-sequel that’s included in Table for Two.

I wanted to get that out of the way up top. As for the first half of the book, we have the six New York stories. Well one of them actually mostly takes place in Russia, but they end up in New York so it’s countable as a New York story. As a born and raised and once again resident of the city in question, I’m partial. Who doesn’t love a story about their home town? It just so happens, though, that my home town is the greatest city on earth, which means that you don’t have to be from here to be entertained.

On top of that though, Towles just does it so well. I’ve seen the Upper East Side apartment and the Brooklyn townhouse that the midtown dweller looks down his nose at. I’ve met the Midtown dweller and the woman who lives in the Upper East Side apartment, and I’ve seen the young Brooklyn family walking down the sidewalk. I’ve been to the bookstore, to the restaurant, to the airport, to Carnegie Hall and the Met. Towles clearly has too—on all counts.

These stories are not rats and grunge and riding the subway. They don’t cover the whole spectrum of the New York experience—impossible—but they do capture a facet of it very well. With a couple of exceptions, the pages are populated mostly by people who would use the term powder room do describe their front hall bathroom. Some of them might be calling the bathroom a powder room because that’s what they were raised to call it, and some of them might be calling it that because they want the people who were raised to call it that to think that they were too. You might need a trained eye to tell the difference. It’s upper class New York—whether it’s WASPy or Wall Street—and Towles makes it as amusing as it really is.

Part of this vibe, that I think carries over even into the stories that don’t necessarily take place within the milieu referenced above is a certain feeling of distance detachment. There’s a hovering sense that all is not revealed—that something is missing, that you don’t have all the information. You are just an observer. Do you really know these people at all? You have a sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere is being dishonest.

Despite the recognizable or archetypal tilt, the characters are incredibly human with surprising depth—a feat that in my admittedly limited experience is difficult to achieve in short stories. I noticed as I was reading that even when the narration is first-person, the person doing the narrating is not the central character. In fact, only in “The DiDomenico Fragment” do we have a protagonist narrator, and he’s a fairly aloof figure—at least at the beginning.

Towles’s choices in this regard create an awareness of the gaze—in the literal and broader metaphorical sense—that ties into the feeling of distance so characteristic of the old school upper echelons he’s describing. His characterizations are excellent, and it really does feel like you get to know the characters in each story—their histories, their motivations, etc.. But at the same time there’s this awareness that you don’t, and can’t, really know anything for sure when it comes to other people.

The best way that I can think to describe it, which probably won’t be helpful to anyone who doesn’t like to gossip (let he without sin cast the first stone), is that reading these stories gave me the same feeling that I get from psychoanalyzing near strangers with my friends. You know that you don’t really know what you’re talking about, but you also feel like you just cracked the shell open and revealed a central truth about someone.

That’s how Towles creates his characters. And once they’re created—that’s when it starts to get really good. That’s when this balance between the in control individual and the uncontrollable unknown comes into sharpest focus. That’s when Towles starts to make things happen to them. Maybe that sounds numbingly obvious—that’s what plot is, right? That’s how you tell a story. Character exists, things happen.

In this collection though, the machinations behind this pattern felt more nuanced to me. There’s always a circumstance that can’t be controlled, and it’s that circumstance that everything else is built upon. Well that and the existence of a strong character who will respond in a specific way to said circumstance. Call it serendipity or fate or kismet or maybe even sometimes bad luck.

Even better or perhaps even more accurately, the external circumstances that bump the characters one way or another are frequently…other characters. This became the central theme and thread for me: the impact that we have on each other, whether intentionally or not. It’s doodling in the reading room of the New York Public Library when the right man walks by your table. It’s the image of a woman listening to a practical stranger’s cassette tape in secret. It’s a flight delay and a gregarious, heartfelt stranger standing in line in front of you while you’re waiting to speak to the agent. It’s being a non-political farmer in Russia during the rise of Bolshevism and having a politically inclined wife. It’s sitting in a hotel lobby until the right person sits down next yo you. We touch each other.

It’s the very thing that makes life so spectacular and so terrifying, and Towles confronts his reader with it again and again and again. The dizzying delight and sorrow that you experience when you realize you cannot control. Cannot control anything, least of all the other people all around you acting out their own lives. Sometimes you cannot even control yourself. And I think that is why Kathryn thought the stories were sad and heart heart-wrenching and why I thought they were light and playful. They were both. It’s all always both.

If you don’t know what I mean by that—listen to the podcast and hear us talk more about alllll of our thoughts on this good book! Links below. Xx

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