I recently spoke glowingly to a friend about Amor Towles’ story collection, Table for Two (2024). She acknowledged, without enthusiasm, having read his A Gentleman in Moscow (2016), a novel about a charming man leading a charmed life in a hotel during the first decades of Soviet communism. The novel is completely implausible, one I’d normally have expected to deplore, but I’d been captivated.
I mostly avoid romance, fantasy, science fiction and dystopian fantasy. (I detailed my objections to dystopian fantasy in “What Is It With the Apocalypse?”) Then why do I enjoy and admire Amor Towles’ work? There may be a romantic side to his fiction, but it’s least of all about the vagaries of romantic love. There is fantasy, but in Towles’ hands, it is a slightly heightened reality, the way stereo illuminates the flatness of a mono recording. As for dystopian fantasy, in A Gentleman in Moscow, set during the turbulent, violent, unforgiving early and middle years of Russian communist rule in which dystopia was realized, Towles imagines not just a decent man, but one who brings out the decency in the people around him.
Towles calls himself a “fabulist,” a term that has broadened the word’s connotation for me in light of his fiction. In Table for Two, he collects several short stories that clarify his authorial objectives. Aside from the opening story set mostly in early twentieth century Russia and the closing novella set mostly in mid-twentieth century California, the book’s middle five stories take place in New York City. In each case, a moral or criminal offense has consequences, but ones that are far from foreseeable.
In “The Bootlegger,” an elderly man violates Carnegie Hall’s proscription against recording concerts. Despite first vigorously denying the accusation, he confesses and is genuinely contrite. Yet we learn that his motive was touchingly sympathetic. As the story winds toward its conclusion, one of the recordings takes on a deeply satisfying life of its own.
In “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,” a naïve young man is persuaded by a bookseller to forge authors’ signatures on first editions of well-known books. As events proceed, the young man finally comprehends the scheme and whole-heartedly participates. Yet unexpectedly, the ending takes us right back to the beginning and his then honest and realistic aspirations. For better or worse, he has realized them.
A loyal and loving daughter tries to do the right thing in “I Will Survive.” Her stepfather, whom she also loves, is misleading her mother as the mother suspected, but his deception is hardly what any ordinary reader would consider a betrayal. Claiming another obligation, this man in his sixties spends Saturday afternoons in Central Park skating with a group of fellow enthusiasts to the sound of the disco recording “I Will Survive.” Yet the daughter’s attempts to restore truth between mother and stepfather lead to agonizing consequences. There’s sadness here, as there often is in Towles’ fiction, but it is alleviated by the characters’ decency. Towles forecast this quality in his future fiction when he entitled his first published novel, Rules of Civility (2011).
Are these and Towles’ other stories believable? Yes and no. They are written with rare literary flair, and almost every character has qualities that at least partially redeem. This very charm renders the stories implausible. Life is rarely so delightful, and none of us is quite as good as the most cultivated ones in Towles’ world. In that far-from-perfect world, something approaching purity is attainable. In the hearts of many of us, doesn’t such a world sometimes feel just within reach?
Contrast this approach with novels that literary critics are likely to take more seriously. Dystopian fantasy, perhaps achieving its apotheosis in the works of Cormac McCarthy, (Blood Meridian (1985), etc.), is applauded for its anticipation of the grim consequences of our greed and neglect. Yet does dystopian fantasy offer a more plausible forecast than Towles’ fabulism?
In what to me is a fortunate coincidence, Towles isn’t today’s only author who finds hope and goodness in an imperfect world. Jess Walter is clearly familiar with life’s hardships, but his more memorable characters have the strength to adapt, change and become better. A fine example of his work is the title story of his 2022 volume, The Angel of Rome. Here, a young Midwesterner finds himself an impoverished student in Rome before getting mixed up in the ambiguous world of cinema and actors’ machinations. Time passes. Tantalizing loose ends come together to bring about a most gratifying ending.
Neither Towles nor Walter’s works are included in the New York Times’ “The Best 100 Books of the 21st Century,” an omission that suggests pessimism is rated more highly than optimism. The business of psychotherapy must be thriving.
I also read fiction and nonfiction about less stable places, as well as about societies in the past. Terrible things are happening in Sudan, the Middle East, Ukraine, inside Russia, the PRC, and many other countries, and also in neighborhoods not far from my own here in Brooklyn. It feels unfair that I’m living in a lovely location with only the smallest anxiety for what could go wrong while millions of people, most through no fault of their own, are suffering from war, internal oppression or chronic poverty.
Yet I don’t view Towles or Walter’s fiction as escapist. Rather, because their fictional worlds more resemble my real world than the grim ones conjured up by dystopians, it makes sense for me to seek reading pleasure and insights from them. The test for a book shouldn’t be its author’s temperament, but its writing quality, storytelling, character development and wisdom. To be qualifiedly optimistic is not incompatible with wisdom.
It’s nearly impossible to imagine Jane Austen writing today; her fiction depends on social mores that have changed too dramatically. But many of her characters exhibit strength and integrity, and her novels arrive at sometimes qualifiedly optimistic endings. Would a contemporary Jane Austen be revered by today’s critics? Sally Rooney, who gets a lot of press, comes to mind. Could her success mean that contemporary critics apply a different standard to young women authors than they do to men like Towles and Walter? (I am not the first to ask this question.) And yet even Rooney didn’t make the Times’ list.
I could focus, if I chose, on people and situations that have frustrated me, but far many more people, whether family, friends or even strangers, have given me an abiding sense of kindness and contentment. Towles and Walter populate their fiction with many characters, among whom are people such as these. If, or perhaps I should say when, calamity strikes, I’ll have no choice but to deal with it. Until then, I’d be foolish, if not self-destructive, to make myself miserable for the sake of being miserable.
Towles and Walter present scenarios we can learn from or live up to. Their fiction deserves as much critical enthusiasm as any work of pessimism.
Leave a Comment