Table for Two by Amor Towles

Table for Two by Amor Towles

464 pages

Published April 2024 by Penguin Publishing Group

Publisher's Summary: 

Millions of Amor Towles fans are in for a treat as he shares some of his shorter fiction: six stories based in New York City and a novella set in Golden Age Hollywood.

The New York stories, most of which take place around the year 2000, consider the fateful consequences that can spring from brief encounters and the delicate mechanics of compromise that operate at the heart of modern marriages.

In Towles’s novel Rules of Civility, the indomitable Evelyn Ross leaves New York City in September 1938 with the intention of returning home to Indiana. But as her train pulls into Chicago, where her parents are waiting, she instead extends her ticket to Los Angeles. Told from seven points of view, “Eve in Hollywood” describes how Eve crafts a new future for herself—and others—in a noirish tale that takes us through the movie sets, bungalows, and dive bars of Los Angeles.

Written with his signature wit, humor, and sophistication, Table for Two is another glittering addition to Towles’s canon of stylish and transporting fiction.

My Thoughts: 

You've long heard me say of short story collections that there are always some stories that are better than others, some that don't work for me. Not so with this collection and the novella that brings Towles back to where it all began. That last sentence of the publisher's summary? Spot on. 

I was enchanted with the characters and the circumstances of every story, from the first about a Russian man who finds his place in Bolshevik Russia as someone who will stand in line for others and eventually found himself doing the same thing in the United States:

"Though the peasant Pushkin did not share his namesake's facility with words, he was something of a poet in his sod - and when he witnessed the leaves sprouting on the birch trees, or the thunderstorms of summer, or the golden hues of autumn, he would feel in his heart that theirs was a satisfactory life."

To the woman who discovers the secret life of her stepfather only to have it cost her mother the marriage:

"But before she'd walked a hundred feet, the opening riff of The Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive," suddenly started playing from a boom box to Nell's left, and that's where she saw him. If it weren't for his silver hairs, she would have missed him altogether. For the minutes that her stepfather had been out of her sight, he had experienced something of a transformation. Gone were the tan pants, white Oxford, and blue blazer. In their place, John now wore silky red jogging shorts, a blue T-shirt emblazoned with the figure of Mr. Met, a white headband a la Bjorn Borg circa 1975, and on his feet a pair of roller skates."

Every story was unique with a touch of philosophy, morality, and humor. None of the endings was predictable. I would have happily read more short stories. But, of course, the reason I was most excited to get to this book was to pick back up with Eve Ross who disappeared from NYC in Rules of Civility but not from readers' memories. Clearly not from Towle's, either. Expectations were high and I was not disappointed. Eve was exactly as I remembered her and the story is filled with all the glitter and seediness of 1938 Hollywood. Eve befriends a former police detective on the train ride across the country who, along with a portly former movie star, assists her when her new friend, Olivia de Havilland, is blackmailed. It give off the noir air of the films of an era that absolutely comes alive in Towle's hands. 

I checked this one out from the library. I might find myself buying a copy so that I can reread it (as much as I want others to read it, I might even loan it out if I own it). 

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

My Monticello by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

224 pages

Published October 2021 by Henry Holt and Co. 

Publisher's Summary:

A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America.

Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation.

In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.”

My Thoughts: 

I don't recall where I first heard of this collection but I'm sure I was as much drawn to it by it's title as it's content. I have revered Thomas Jefferson for most of my life, even knowing that he was wrong to have been a slave owner. It's only in the past decade or so that I began to consider him and his legacy more closely. What might a descendant of Sally Hemings think about Jefferson's Monticello? I knew I wanted to read that story. 

This collection is stunning and thought provoking and so terribly sad. Sad because it makes plain how difficult life has been being black in America but even more so because it paints such a terrifyingly realistic of a future America where it is even more difficult. Each of the short stories in the collection is written in an entirely unique style and every one of them has its strengths. The first, "Control Negro," is, as Roxane Gay says, "one hell of a story." In it a professor asks the question, "Given the right conditions, could America extend her promise of Life and Liberty to me too, to someone like me?" To find out, he needs a "control Negro" and so impregnates a young woman then supports his son from a distance, making sure that he has every advantage a young white man might. It's brilliant. 

But as I read the collection, as I so often do when I read books by and about black Americans, I wondered if I'm the best person to judge such a collection. I can tell you that I'm wow'd by this collection, by Johnson's writing, and look forward to reading more by her. But does it speak to those whom she is writing about? To answer that, I turned to Gay, who has this to say about the collection: 

"It is a rare breed of writer who can tell any kind of story and do so with exquisite deftness. Jocelyn Nicole Johnson is one such writer. Her debut collection, My Monticello, is comprised of six stories of astonishing range and each one explores what it means to live in a world that is at once home and not. She dissects the unbearable burdens of such displacement. The crowning glory of this collection is the title story, a novella about a world that has fallen apart and a small band of people who take refuge in Monticello, among the old ghosts of the former plantation, how they become family, and how they try to make a stand for their lives, for the world the way it once was. This collection is absolutely unforgettable and Johnson's prose soars to remarkable heights."  - author Roxane Gay

Colin Grant, of The Guardian, has this to say: 

Throughout the novel, there are echoes of the historical resistance of African Americans outnumbered and outgunned by foes, yet fighting back. As Da’Naisha’s band of walking wounded brothers and sisters prepare for one last stand, you fear the worst. My Monticello is a bleak story but reading it elicits the same kind of sensation that comes from listening to a poignant blues song: there is pleasure in its creation without denying the pain of the subject.

If you're a fan of short stories and you're prepared to be made uncomfortable, I can't recommend this collection highly enough. 

The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison

The River Swimmer by Jim Harrison
Published January 2013 by Grove/Atlantic Inc.
Source: purchased

Publisher's Summary:
The River Swimmer is Jim Harrison at his most memorable: two men, one young and one older, confronting inconvenient loves and the encroachment of urbanity on nature, written with freshness, abundant wit, and profound humanity. In “The Land of Unlikeness,” Clive—a failed artist, divorced and grappling with the vagaries of his declining years—reluctantly returns to his family’s Michigan farmhouse to visit his aging mother. The return to familiar territory triggers a jolt of renewal—of ardor for his high school sweetheart, of his relationship with his estranged daughter, and of his own lost love of painting. In “The River Swimmer,” Harrison ventures into the magical as an Upper Peninsula farm boy is irresistibly drawn to swimming as an escape, and sees otherworldly creatures in the water. Faced with the injustice and pressure of coming of age, he takes to the river and follows its siren song all the way across Lake Michigan.


My Thoughts:
Jim Harrison is one of those authors who I’ve been reading about for years but never actually reading. I mean, I own one of his physical books which sits collecting dust on my shelves and I even requested this one from Netgalley before it was released. Still I hadn’t read any of his work.

Sometimes I think we know too much about authors, we have the ability to learn things about them that may color our impression of them to such an extent that we put off reading their books. I hadn’t felt that way about Harrison until he died last year and something someone said about him at that time put me off. For the life of me, I can’t remember what it was. Perhaps something along the lines of “man’s man.” Which, of course (although why “of course” I cannot say), meant he wrote books for men and; therefore, not for me. Ridiculous, I know, and I’m a little embarrassed about what that says about me.

But I’m bound and determined to go back and read the books I requested on Netgalley that I never got to when I had the chance before they were published. So I bought The River Swimmer. And now I am kicking myself for not picking up Harrison’s work sooner.

To be sure, the two novellas in this book are about men and the first of the novellas, The Land of Unlikeness, is about a 60-year-old man facing a kind of crisis of identity and direction. There’s nothing in either of the novellas to which I can especially relate (other than that both stories are set in the Midwest, which may have been all it took). It didn’t matter. Harrison’s writing sucked me in and his characters intrigued me. The man can absolutely make a scene come alive. Both novellas have elements of humor, which I enjoyed; but The River Swimmer is also brutal. Both served to bring emotion to the stories.

The Land of Unlikeness is an intimate story; we are mostly living in Clive’s head as he returns to his childhood home to care for his mother and, in the process, examine what has become of his life. As he works to rebuild his relationships with his family, Clive also comes to realize that home is enough. In The River Swimmer, Harrison takes us on the journey of a 17-year-old man child as his life takes him from his tight-knit family farm on an island to Europe. There is an element of fantasy in this story and an element of the old-fashioned tall tales but it comes down to be the story of one person trying to find his place in the world.

As further incentive for you to try Harrison, specifically for those of you who have seen and loved the movie Legends of the Fall, Harrison wrote the novella on which that movie is based. I’ll definitely be finding that other Harrison book on my shelves and then I need to get my hands on Legends of the Fall!