Point of View

Towles employs a variety of points of view throughout the collection, as the seven stories do not share the same narrator and are not interconnected in any sense beyond their thematic resonances. "The Line" and "The Ballad of Timothy Touchett" are told by an omniscient third-person narrator who remains largely satellite to the broader plot, while "Hasta Luego," "I Will Survive," "The Bootlegger," and "The DiDomenico Fragment" each uses a first-person narrator. Meanwhile, "Eve in Hollywood," the novella that rounds out the collection, is told by a third-person narrator but switches between a variety of narrative perspectives, at various points occupying the viewpoints of Evelyn, Olivia, Charlie, Prentice, Litsky, Wendell, and Finnegan in order to create a kind of revolving door of perspectives on the broader atmosphere of Hollywood.

The shorter pieces in the collection each benefit from being told in their given point of...