I’ve read every book Amor Towles has written, and despite the fact that I’m not normally a fan of short stories, when I saw he was coming out with a collection of short fiction, I had to grab a copy.
That said, I’ve really been enjoying short stories lately, so maybe I should stop saying I don’t like short stories.
These short stories were SO GOOD!!!
His writing is as beautiful as always. His characters manage to come to life in just a few pages.
But what really floored me about these short stories was the way in which they almost always ended with a punch.
Take “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett” as an example. At first blush, it seems to have a fairly predictable formula: Timothy’s prospects are not great, Timothy’s prospects improve, then things take a turn for the worse.
We’ve all seen this rise-and-fall formula before, so I didn’t think much of it until the very last line, in which Towles makes a callback to something referenced at the very beginning of the story. It was so delightful, and so surprising I barked out a laugh and startled my dog as she was settling down for the night.
“The Ballad of Timothy Touchett” is probably my favorite short story from this collection, but from that point on (it’s the second story in the collection,) I was fully on board with wherever Towles wanted to take me. And he did not disappoint.
But this book is not only short stories. The last 200 pages are a novella called “Eve in Hollywood.”
If you read Rules of Civility, you might remember a certain character named Eve who hopped on a train home, but her parents later called her best friend, Katherine, saying she never got off the train, despite the fact that they waited and waited and looked everywhere for her. Turns out she had extended her train ticket all the way to Los Angeles.
This novella starts with Eve on the train asking how much it would cost to extend her ticket, and paying the extra fair.
Once in Hollywood, she takes up residence at a nice hotel, although it’s never clear where she got the money for it. Maybe she got a nice pile of cash from her boyfriend after she turned down his proposal?
There are a couple mentions of the fact that she had a single diamond earring when she checked in, that she later took out of the hotel, and came back with shopping bags. So she pawned the earring for clothes, but not for her hotel bill, apparently.
In Rules of Civility, there’s a brief mention of a photo of Eve with a famous Hollywood actress, but that actress is never named.
In this novella she’s identified as Oliva de Hallivand, and I was surprised Towles decided to go with a real actress, although I suppose it’s been long enough there’s no reason he couldn’t.
The action starts when Olivia comes crying to Eve because she’s been sent some compromising photos of herself, along with a blackmail letter, and she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t even know how, when, or where the photos were taken.
It turns out they were taken behind a two-way mirror in the pool-side changing room of a local thrower of extravagant parties. And Olivia is far from the only starlet whose picture was taken.
Throughout the course of the book we learn a little bit about Olivia’s history, the history of the two guys who try to blackmail her, the ex-cop who helps out Olivia and Eve, and the ex-cop working security at the hotel where Eve and Olivia are staying.
I won’t give it away, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the ride Towles took me on, as well as how he managed to wrap everything up.
As with the short stories, the surprise ending relies on a call-back to something mentioned in the very first chapter of the novella.
My only quibble with the novella is that Towles called it “Eve in Hollywood,” and while Eve is at the center of the action for most of the chapters, she never gets to tell her own story. Instead, each chapter is told in third-person limited from the POV of another character observing and interacting with Eve. But none of them know anything about her or her history. Why don’t we get to hear Eve’s perspective on everything she’s doing and seeing and observing?