In his 2023 book The Art Thief, author Michael Finkel crucially observed (my book review here) that “art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure of all.” So true, and it raises an exciting question about the present and future of art: as an increasingly globalized division of labor comprised of man, machines, and machines that think make life’s necessities and luxuries more and more of a sure thing, isn’t the brilliance of art set to explode in a myriad of amazing ways?
Time will tell. For now, it’s interesting to contemplate the past. In particular, what was happening economically in 19th century Russia that so much amazing literature and music was created? Think Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tchaikovsky, and Tolstoy among many others. If art is the result of facing almost no survival pressure at all, it’s apparent that in the 19th century Russia must have had prosperity-oriented policies (or better yet a lack of policy) that enabled immense artistic progress.
All the spectacular 19th century Russian culture came to mind while reading Amor Towles’s newest book, Table for Two. This time Towles has written a series of short stories along with a novella. The first of the short stories is titled “The Line,” and it’s about a peasant named Pushkin and his wife Irina. In the last days of the Tsar, they live in a small village “one hundred miles from Moscow.”
Farmers Pushkin and Irina belong to a mir, or a cooperative that “leased the land, allocated the acres, and shared expenses at the mill.” Members of the mir occasionally gather, and one night a man from Moscow comes to “explain the injustice of a country in which 10 percent of the people owned 90 percent of the land.” I felt from this that Towles provided the answer to the above question about why Russian culture flowered so substantially in the 19th century.
Economies aren’t blobs, rather they’re collections of individuals. Which is a reminder that wealth inequality is a sign of progress. It signals the freedom of individuals to pursue the commercial path that reveals their unique genius, and being matched with capital so that they can realize their potential.
Absent capital there’s no Jeff Bezos, and then absent Jeff Bezos’s capital there’s quite a bit less wealth to match with strivers who aim to improve on what Bezos achieved. Crucially, if there’s no wealth creation, it’s a near certainty that not much art is being created precisely because artists require patrons. Get it?
19th century Russian culture was an effect of wealth. It raises questions about what Russia (and the world) lost in the 20th century. In his 1922 masterpiece Socialism, Austrian scholar Ludwig von Mises observed that socialist demagogues are given life by wealth creation, and it brings us back to the demagogue from Moscow who speaks in disdainful fashion about wealth inequality to Pushkin and Irina’s mir. Wealth demagogues are an effect of wealth creation, wealth creation is an effect of freedom, and art is once again an effect of wealth. Too bad the wealth demagogues won in Russia as evidenced by the country’s economic suicide in the 20th century. What a tragedy for freedom, progress and art.
In Towles’s remarkable story, Irina in particular is taken in by the visitor and subsequently decides for herself and Pushkin that “the time has come for Russia to lay the foundations of the future – shoulder to shoulder and stone by stone!” They subsequently sell their meager possessions, and move to Moscow to join the revolution.
Irina thrives in the new, declining Russia, while Pushkin flails. They both take jobs at Red Star Biscuit Collective, but Pushkin is soon fired. Irina memorably asks her beta husband “How does one get fired from communism?”
Yet despite Pushkin’s ineptitude on the job, he oddly finds life under communism appealing exactly because there’s little to no choice. Long lines for a black loaf of bread, but only a black loaf of bread. To Pushkin, the appeal of limited choice is that he can do no wrong. And having found inner peace of sorts within the brutality of communism, Pushkin oddly prospers. Which speaks to the joy of Towles’s short story.
It brings to mind the heavily passed around clip of Milton Friedman on Phil Donahue’s eponymous show, of Donahue asking Friedman if Soviet communism has noble qualities since it’s allegedly a society devoid of greed. Friedman rejected the question outright, pointing out to Donahue that greed in fact did define life in the Soviet Union. So does it in “The Line.”
Markets always speak, and Pushkin makes them speak. Cognizant of the reality that lines for limited goods had to be the norm under communism, Pushkin starts a waiting-in-line business. And it proves lucrative. “By 1925, Pushkin had 10 boys waiting in 30 lines, all of them handing tokens of gratitude to Pushkin.” Yes!
Markets once again always speak, and they do because they’re an expression of human nature. It’s a reminder of a happy truth too often forgotten by critics of free markets: they claim that the return of economic freedom where there had been none amounts to “shock therapy” whereby individuals allegedly require an easing back to freedom as they re-learn what they allegedly forgot. Nonsense. That’s like saying people who’ve been starving need to learn once again how to eat. They don’t. It’s natural.
The only difference with Pushkin is that he’s particularly good at instituting market forces where there are none such that he and Irina are soon living well. Wait, Irina is living well after cheering the revolution against possessions? Well, yes. As Towles puts it oh so well, “There is nothing that a human will adapt to more quickly than an improved standard of living.” Amen.
The main thing is that there’s so much to Towles’s story. No doubt Pushkin figures out how to prosper in a country that has largely banned it, which is itself a tragedy. As made plain in my review of Towles’s best novel so far, A Gentleman In Moscow, it’s the unequal (yes, the 1 percenters) who drive progress in all ways. Pushkin and Irina were living well, but all due to a system that suffocated genius of all kinds such that gaming the lines that are the rule under communism was one of the very few ways to prosper.
Towles writes through the eyes of Pushkin of genius suffocated, that “To possess such a gift and no longer be allowed to put it to use struck Pushkin as heartbreaking.” Yes. So true.
It arguably speaks to why most hated communism, but some actually were ok with it. For those who lacked skills, or who had not happened on skills, communism would reasonably be the excuse for their failure. But for those cognizant of their genius, how brutalizing to not be able to showcase it.
About this, it’s difficult to not think of actors like Kevin Spacey who are no longer able to do what gave them so much happiness. Some will say Spacey earned his suffocation, but that’s not fair. They’re judging Spacey’s past acts on present morals. George Will refers to this as presentism. It’s wrongheaded, and not just because talented people can no longer express those talents. Presentism is also wrong because it supposes a world and society defined by rigidity, or a lack of progress. No, that’s not us. We keep improving, and in improving we quite frequently look back to past actions with disdain. Yes, we’re evolving. The past is the past. To ruin the present of so many based on the past is truly horrifying.
In “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett” that follows, we meet a would-be writer who interestingly lacks the life experiences and sufficient misery to be a writer. As Towles puts it so comically, “Timothy’s parents hadn’t even bothered to succumb to alcoholism or file for divorce.” Notable there is that in reading the story, I found myself wondering if life’s brutalities had informed Towles’s own writing.
Whatever the answer, the Touchett story is a reminder of how much learning there is in fiction. It’s useful to point out mainly because so many voracious readers stick to non-fiction. Some feel they don’t have time for stories, that life is short such that reading time has to be spent on real history. Towles’s stories show us what a mistake this is. Just as we learn about ourselves through real historical figures, so do we through fictional characters.
With Touchett, Towles brings the reader to the arguably crucial revelation that we’re more malleable than we think, and arguably to our detriment: “…offer a young man an extra fifty dollars a week in exchange for a modest adjustment in his dreams, and you have him by the throat.” I felt like Towles was describing all too many of us, including your reviewer.
It also made me think of the 2016 movie La La Land. Why did Mia fall out of love with Sebastian? My speculation has always been that he sold his dreams in return for more stable earnings, and she lost interest as a result. Was that the director’s (Damien Chazelle) message?
What got Touchett by the throat was dishonesty, though seemingly harmless dishonesty that proved remunerative. The story is a page turner, but for one disappointing line that may or may not be the thinking of Towles. With Touchett, the story is about the writer and his rare bookstore owner boss Mr. Pennybrook, along with a NYC cop who is informed of a potential crime. Are opinions expressed through Touchett, Mr. Pennybrook and Lieutenant McCusker those of Towles, or are they what Towles imagines Touchett, Pennybrook and McCusker would think?
Whatever the answer, in pursuing a crime of false signatures McCusker contemplates how “the boys with the MBAs had begun building Sistine Chapels of larceny right there on Wall Street.” Towles’s background is finance, but did he or does he share McCusker’s simplistic view of Wall Street? I found myself hoping not. With all commerce there’s two sides, and on Wall Street the clients of the institutions are much more often than not smarter than their coverage at the institutions. Think Goldman Sachs, a firm that makes an appearance in a later story by Towles: its wealth managers earning millions a year earn that money because they’re managing the wealth of centimillionaires and billionaires, their traders are covering the most sophisticated hedge funds in the world, and their investment bankers are courting and financing the world’s greatest companies. The Sistene Chapel line implies trickery hatched within investment banks. Ok, but whom did they trick?
In “Hasta Luego,” what most stuck with me was the question asked by Jerry at the story’s end about whether “my wife would be willing to fight for me as hard as Jennifer had fought for her husband.” Her husband, Smitty, unexpectedly has problems that reveal themselves after bad weather forces the cancellation of LaGuardia’s outbound flights.
What’s interesting about Jennifer in the story is that as a reader of it, you find yourself thinking of her as the nightmarish wife, as the person you hope Smitty won’t get in too much trouble with, only for the great storyteller in Towles to force the reader (married male readers in particular) to rethink the perception of Smitty’s wife, and in the process perhaps rethink how they perceive their own wives.
About the canceled flights that set the stage for Jerry and Smitty’s night at a hotel bar in Manhattan, Towles writes of “the audible sighs, the eye rolling, the muttered profanity.” Yes. Fiction is reality in so many ways.
The story of Jerry and Smitty also brings up something about Towles the fiction writer: he knows so much. Smitty loved tequila, “He loved the blanco, the reposado, and the anejo.” In “The DiDomenico Fragment,” we learn about art, including that some art pieces exist as fragments. Who knew? Towles explains why turkey on Thanksgiving is frequently so dry, and all sorts of little and big things that enhance his page-turning stories. It’s a digression on the way to speculating that Towles is a good conversation and a great Trivial Pursuit partner. His knowledge is vast.
Back to the stories, “I Will Survive” seemed least believable at first, but ended pretty powerfully. Peggy worries second husband John is cheating on her, and asks daughter Nell to follow him to his weekly squash game at the Union Club to see if her worries are true. Peggy says to Nell that “You and your sister both like to joke about what a mess your lives would be if it weren’t for John.” Except that John is 68, and he came into their mother’s life at 64. The comment didn’t fit the timeframe?
And when Nell gets dressed to follow her stepfather, her husband tells her to not wear his Mets’ cap since “John is a Mets fan. And when one Mets fan sees another, he’s bound to come over and commiserate.” No, that just didn’t read as realistic.
Just the same, the conclusion of the story did seem realistic. And powerfully so. Without mentioning what Peggy ultimately finds out about her husband, what a revelation it is. And it’s unexpectedly cruel despite the revelation not being of the prurient sort. Towles is so interesting.
In an argument that ensues from the revelation Towles observes that “in the aftermath of a heated conversation, bad ideas travel at the speed of light.” So true, and a reminder to us all that our worst ideas and most crippling thoughts reveal themselves when we’re most prone to act or talk on them. We all need to learn to shut our mouths. Let time elapse. Lots of time.
The least compelling of the stories was “The Bootlegger.” It involves a young, but pretty senior Goldman Sachs investment banker (Tommy Harkness) and his wife at Carnegie Hall for a concert, or series of concerts. Arthur Fein sits next to them early on, and it quickly becomes apparent to Harkness that Fein is taping the concerts. Harkness is deeply offended: he haughtily asserts that “copyright laws were created because a world in which artists cannot secure fair compensation for their endeavors is a world less likely to contain art.” The bet here is that Towles doesn’t agree with Tommy.
Towles plainly loves writing, and while he’s made substantial sums as a writer, it’s hard to imagine he got into it with the expectation that he would be the globally famous author of bestsellers, including one (so far) that’s made it into the miniseries category. The speculation here is that Towles recognized that he had a talent, and then proceeded to write a book for himself. Huge audiences were the against-all-odds surprise.
People create art because they want to, because they can’t not create it. More than a few would still create it even without fair compensation. And if given the choice between typical compensation and reaching millions without compensation, most would take the big audiences. Furthermore, copyright as applied to Carnegie Hall cuts both ways. If Carnegie Hall reserves the right to distribute the music of the artists that play there, why would Fein have needed to bootleg in the first place?
Fein has an answer to the above question, but it didn’t make much sense, nor did it make sense that a top investment banker would suddenly have the inclination or time to walk a pre-scanned part of Manhattan each day in search of Fein in order to apologize for what transpired at the concert hall. And then the reaction of Fein’s daughter to Harkness was way over the top.
“The Bootlegger” is redeemed by “The DiDomenico Fragment.” Once again, Towles knows so much. Or he knows a great deal more than his readers. The short story about a piece of art and subsequent sale of same was interesting and revelatory.
Which brings us to the novella, “Eve In Hollywood,” that closes Towles’s excellent book. About it, I first read Towles’s first novel, Rules of Civility, in 2011. It rates mention because Eve is a character from it, though one I’m pretty hazy about at this point. “Eve In Hollywood” was very good, but would likely be much better after a re-read of Rules of Civility (so little time), and also a re-read of the novella itself.
Having done neither, I lacked sufficient memory of Eve to bring to the novella. The latter also brings a lot of characters into the story at short bursts. The story seemed a little bit difficult to follow, but it was rewarding just the same. So rewarding that it deserves another read.
With “Eve In Hollywood,” Towles is doing novel noir. The Los Angeles of old, “the city within the city that had its own diners and cable cars, its own chapels and banks,” but also the other one defined by “gangsters and grifters and ladies of the night.” Towles writes it so well, including the great Beverly Hills Hotel. To read the novella is to hope that Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential) will option it for a movie, or that Roman Polanski (Chinatown) will get ahold of it.
The characters (including Eve) are so interesting, so wise. Prentice Symmons is the once prominent actor who once had great looks because by his own admission he was starving himself. His “rotundity” is what ended his career, and it happened on a day when he “tumbled down the vertiginous trail of my desires.” Food got the best of him. Don’t ever say actors and actresses are soft or don’t work hard.
About men, “we are doomed to end our days in an ignorance largely of our own making” but for the sad fact that we’re “either too proud, too stubborn, or too timid to submit to the process of discovery.” As always, Towles is so interesting, as is his story about a movie industry scandal and bribery that takes place in a town (it’s said 1935 Los Angeles had town-like qualities) where “the law, like everyone else in this city, was on the payroll.”
What a read “Eve In Hollywood” was, and what a better read it will be a second time around thanks to a grasp of the various characters. What a collection of stories Table for Two is. How fun it will be to read and write about what’s next from Amor Towles.
