Table for Two: Fictions

Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2024

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Summary

Background

Story Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Story 1

Part 1, Story 2

Part 1, Story 3

Part 1, Story 4

Part 1, Story 5

Part 1, Story 6

Part 2, Epigraph-Section 1

Part 2, Section 2, Chapters 1-6

Part 2, Section 2, Chapters 7-13

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Attaining and Experiencing Happiness

Towles’s presentation of happiness is varied throughout the works in his collection, but an essential theme across the stories is the need for satisfaction and the different ways an individual can pursue and achieve happiness. The collection opens with “The Line,” which features Pushkin’s poetic view of the Russian pastoral experience as a site of contentment: He feels “in his heart that theirs was a satisfactory life” (3). Pushkin’s circumstances change, but the story still ends with Pushkin giving another man a “friendly wave” (39)—switching from being a farmer, to waiting in lines in the Soviet Union, to waiting in a bread line in the US does not dampen his spirits. Instead, he refuses to see his position as metaphorical: Being at the end of the line for charity is not, to Pushkin, “the end of anything at all” (39). This attitude is a testament to his resilient contentedness. Pushkin’s happiness is simple, relying primarily on his safety and comfort, unlike with Irina’s happiness, which is rooted in hard work and accomplishment.

Towles’s characters come alive in the moments in which they feel most happy—though this does not necessarily cause similar pleasure to those around them. In the fourth story of the collection, “I Will Survive,” John’s method for achieving happiness is the focal point of the conflict between him and his wife Peggy, who sees John’s roller-skating as tantamount to a sexual affair. Their son-in-law Jeremy describes the video of John roller-skating as an image of “unadulterated joy”: “John, this genteel old man surrounded by a small fraternity of admirers, with his hands crossed on his chest and his head tilted back, turning in circle to the point at which he almost blurred” (139). This joy is encapsulated in the complete change in John’s demeanor in the recording; he has shed the rigid, proper bearing of his age and class to lose himself in the pleasure of skating. However, this pleasure completely excludes Peggy from the most important part of John’s life: the thing that brings him happiness.

Other characters’ happiness is an expression of their fundamental need for purpose. At the conclusion of “Eve in Hollywood,” Eve tells Charlie: “At this moment, Charlie, I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world” (437), a sentiment that Charlie then repeats back to Eve at his home. For Eve, happiness comes from subverting the ill intentions of men like Litsky and Finnegan; for Charlie, happiness comes from meting out justice. Helping Olivia has made their life worthwhile.

Power, Money, and the Individual

Though money is not always corrupting in Towles’s stories, it is always linked with power and the individual struggle with temptation. In “Timothy Touchett,” money is an explicitly corrupting influence, as Timothy is led astray from his goal of becoming a novelist by the easy money he gains from forging signatures. Pennybrook strews Timothy’s path with temptations, which Timothy gladly accepts because it allows him to enjoy the kind of success he could have attained in his failed literary career: “[T]he days when the world was divided into manor and huts” is past, since “an extra fifty dollars a week will allow us to take one more step up the ladder of well-being to a tier where the soups are a little more tasty” (52). The offer of $50 is precisely what begins Timothy path into forgery, and the offer of even tastier soups leads him to pursue forgery as though it were a valid enterprise.

“The DiDomenico Fragment” is an explicit study in how money and power can corrupt an individual. To secure the finder’s fee for the sale of one of his family’s heirloom portions of the “Annunciation” by DiDomenico, Skinner pursues his cousins, Billy and Peter, feigning interest in their lives to get closer to their fragments. Hoping to get invited to Thanksgiving dinner at Peter’s, Skinner thinks: “But in the field of fine art, one must be prepared to make sacrifices,” adding that it is worthwhile to eat “a serving of sweet potatoes covered in marshmallows” to make “Peter see the benefits of divestment” (219). Critically, Skinner’s “field” is not fine art, but swindling his cousin out of his family heirloom, while the sweet potatoes stand in for how unpleasant he finds spending time with Peter’s family. For Skinner, family is an inconvenience he needs to endure to gain the power and money of the fragment. By the end of the story, however, Skinner realizes the error of his ways, an opportunity Timothy did not have.

In “Eve in Hollywood,” the primary motivations of antagonists Litsky and Finnegan are power and wealth: Blackmail gives them a measure of control over and the ability to extract money from the studios they resent for ending their careers. In the novella, which relies on the tropes of noir fiction, this greed and corruption is a trait of Los Angeles as a whole. Finnegan knows that “anything that was done in Los Angeles illegally could be done in Los Angeles with the full backing of the law, as long as it was set up the right way” (426); for one example, the studios are willing to buy back the nude photos and write off the expense as a loss for tax purposes. Subverting the expectations of noir, Litsky and Finnegan’s scheme is foiled by the empathy and optimism of Eve and her crew, who are just marginalized enough not to have absorbed the corruption of Los Angeles natives.

Following and Subverting Social Expectations

Towles suggests that adhering to social norms may not always be the best course; better to determine our actions based on the needs of those around us. The third story in the collection, “Hasta Luego,” introduces Jerry and Smitty, each of whom breaks social expectations in different ways. While Jerry is less outgoing and friendly than Smitty, he is characterized as responsible and trustworthy. While Smitty’s alcohol dependence facilitates a boisterous demeanor and encourages friendliness, it also leaves him $1,000 in debt to the hotel and reliant on strangers willing to take his shoes and make sure he makes his plane. Jerry summarizes the issue of social expectations by saying: “We all have our flaws. Some large and some small. Some that come and go, others that persist” (105), using the specific example of failing to remember birthdays. These flaws are essentially deviations from the expectations of society, though as he discovers in the story, truly helping a fellow human being frequently means rejecting social norms.

Meanwhile, those who are sticklers for the rules of polite society often become antagonists. Tommy, in “The Bootlegger,” adheres to social norms by acquiring his seats at Carnegie Hall, and he further enforces social norms by reporting Mr. Fein for surreptitiously recording the concert. Tommy is correct in asserting that Mr. Fein’s behavior “is contrary to universally accepted concert hall decorum” (150). By recording the concert, Mr. Fein is subverting the social expectations to which Tommy adheres. However, Tommy’s intransigence fails to grasp the nuance of the situation: the moral truths of Mr. Fein’s age, status as a widower, longstanding presence at Carnegie Hall, and intended use of the recording as a memento of his dead wife, override the scruples Tommy’s objection, leading both Mary and Meredith to resent his behavior. Though Tommy’s adherence to social expectations is technically correct, the context in which that adherence occurs refutes his desire for social order.

Throughout “Eve in Hollywood,” Eve’s behavior is notably contrary to social expectations, with her periodic use of an affected Southern accent serving to highlight her disdain for social norms. Her influence on Olivia emphasizes the importance of rejecting the gender expectations that leave women vulnerable and victimized. Discussing their mothers, Eve tells Olivia that while her mother “told me it was more important to be interested than interesting,” Eve has followed this advice “[o]nly as a last resort” (266). In other words, Eve’s mother taught her to be self-effacing, espousing the traditional expectation of female passivity and intellectual invisibility; however, Eve only play-acts at fitting into the social model when necessary to get the men around her to underestimate her. Instead, Eve steps outside those restrictions, which allows her to sleuth, foil the blackmailers’ plans, and protect the female actresses who don’t enjoy her freedom.