Being the type of reviewer who skips the back cover copy and the author’s note the first time around, I was surprised when the second half of this short story collection seemed to go on and on… and it kept going until the book ended.

It was, of course, not until a careful review of all the supplemental material when I realized that the second half of Table for Two was a novella. The novella, titled Eve in Hollywood, continued the story of a character from Rules of Civility, one of Amor Towles’s earlier novels. It’s told from seven different viewpoints, and while it ends strong, it’s not the strongest part of the collection. We will revisit it later in this review.

The first half of Table for Two is titled New York, and all the stories contained within do have something to do with New York City. It’s a delightful collection of wildly different tales. The first one is about a Russian farmer’s singular experience with lines in newly-Soviet Russia. There’s a story about a traveler, a canceled flight, a friendly stranger, and a night in a hotel bar that goes off the rails. New York ends with the story of a painting handed down from generation to generation within a family—divided into smaller and smaller pieces, depending on how many children there were to inherit a piece.

Arguably the strongest among the six New York stories is The Bootlegger, which tells a familiar tale of loss and reminiscence, but does it with remarkable style: emotional but not melodramatic, bittersweet but strongly grounded in reality.

These stories share that trait in particular: they are interesting, diverse, and they feel honest. Some of the stories are a bit more fanciful than the others, but the New York collection is best described as a series of windows into the interesting lives of the seemingly mundane.

Amor Towles writes that it was only after compiling his stories that he realized how all of them shared a common theme: a critical beat in a story shared by two people across a kitchen table. This is as good a reason as any and the strongest argument for the inclusion of the second half of the book, titled Los Angeles and then curiously titled once again Eve in Hollywood.

This reviewer has not read Rules of Civility, which might be the reason why this story caused me so much confusion. New York’s stories were slices of lives lived in interesting ways. Los Angeles is a single-long story that is very stylized and, sadly, not too interesting for a newcomer to the titular character of Eve.

Eve in Hollywood is a different beast: a story written in the noir style about power and corruption in 1930s Hollywood. All the tropes are here: the femme fatale, the retired detective, the damsel in distress, and a lot of people in cars staking out or following other people in cars.

The story does ramp up (albeit a bit too late to be interesting), and the best parts are still pretty exciting, but there’s an honest quality in the New York stories that’s absent in Eve in Hollywood—this might be an intentional stylistic choice, but it doesn’t make for a compelling story. Based on what’s in Table for Two, Amor Towles is at his best when he writes about people being people. Like it says in the title, Eve in Hollywood is just a little too lifeless and a little too phony.

Fans of Rules of Civility might have a different take on this. I certainly intend to read it to gain more context into Eve’s character.

Regardless, Table for Two is a worthy read for anyone interested in a well-told story. Pick it up, but temper your expectations once you shift from New York to Los Angeles.