Author of Less Andrew Sean Greer’s New Novel
Helen Elliott
Before starting a novel, be sure to read the epigraph. The author gives you stage directions, and a 20-word epigraph can save you from reading 80,000 words. This is not the case with the epigraph Villa Coco: “The secret of life is knowing what you want.” These immortal words come from the long-dead lips of Princess Maria Augusta of Saxony.
Portraits show him to be intelligent, warm and happy. He never married and died in 1863 at the age of 80. This epigraph made me want to cut an apple into quarters, fold them on the couch, and move on to chapter one. Too old fashioned? Apart from the updated gender, Villa Coco it’s old-fashioned, a nod to the 1920s and 1930s. Order a sofa.
Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. LittleHis cute comic book about an aging gay writer named Less. Some have astutely observed that this is the only novel in which a gay man is allowed to come of age. Greer won the Pulitzer even though she had previously written five critically well-received novels. Little. Greer splits her time between San Francisco and Venice, Italy.
He’s spent time in Italy organizing a writers’ retreat with some Italians who may or may not feature in his new novel, but he airily suggests it’s a novel. fictionalized World. He’s right. Italy itself is fictionalized to the bone these days. It probably always was.
Villa Coco It takes place entirely in Italy and is populated entirely by Italians, except for the young naive man who is the narrator. Greer does something unusual in this novel, even before the epigraph.
On the left-hand page, opposite the dedications, it says, “Dear Reader,” “Whatever happened to the ‘charming novel’? You know, a warm and funny story full of characters, events, and revelations…a book to be re-read every year as a balm for the soul.”
I don’t know how to re-read it every year; Comedy is as susceptible to fashion as anything else, but Villa Coco Nancy Mitford provides the soul with some of that special erudite balm found in Barbara Pym and Stella Gibbons. It also carries the elusive tone of a deeply grieving Edmund White. Is this the tone of the magic of goodness? Greer and White share the same attraction; This has a lot to do with knowing and seeing everything but not judging.
The plot, being as discursive as Proust, is not so much a plot as it is; At the turn of the millennium, a very young man arrives straight from an American university to take a three-month job as an archivist/cataloguer/something in a villa in the hills of northern Tuscany.
He’s running away from his life, a “college carnival” to him and in reality he just wants to rest. “She will not fall in love with a black-haired, half-shaved stranger leaning on a pitchfork in the olive grove,” but she will develop her mind and tend the garden there. Certainly.
And of course, in the first few pages, “Our Young Man” faces a complete comedy of misunderstandings. Greer’s wordplay is delicious. For example, the young man is picked up from the small Tuscan station by a man who speaks no English, thinks that “Our Hero” is commemorated on Thursday, and calls the car Mishu-Bitchy. So the young American becomes Giovedi on Thursday – a play on a badly translated telegram – and the longer joke is about the Friday Man, for those interested. His real name is hidden until the last pages.
Of course, Giovedi falls in love with a beautiful, happily married Italian man who reciprocates his love, and they spend wonderful days together exploring the Italy of 30 years ago. Its sweetness reminds us of the movie, not the novel. Call Me By Your Name.
They’re all pretty old, some even old, and have an extremely obscure cast. Baroness Coco, whom our young man helps in dark and other ways he never thought possible, is in her 90s, and her cynical, less mysterious neighbor Estelle is not far behind them. There are also some lovely old men who are impeccably well-dressed and like James Hamilton Paterson to reminisce about shepherd boys who are always in idyllic settings on rolling pastures. The weather was always very nice in those days. And there are the funny servants on hand for the ridiculous nonsense they do.
The whole novel is completed by Greer’s self-confidence. Excellent author Sarah Winman Still life, called Villa Coco “Absolute happiness”. I found it ridiculous, extremely stupid, but witty and entertaining. Sometimes he specialized; Edmund White, who is currently beaming down from heaven, will confirm this.
Villa Coco Written by Andrew Sean Greer, the book is published by Scepter ($35).
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