Andrew Sean Greer Beneath the Tuscan Enjoyable

The Tuesday Review

In 2018, hours after Andrew Sean Greer received a Pulitzer Prize for Less, I acquired him on the telephone in Italy and requested if he was stunned.

“Oh, come on,” he shot again. “Everyone was surprised!”

True.

Not that we have been dissatisfied — in no way. But there was an abiding sense, certain as loss of life, that severe honors have been reserved for severe books. An excellent comedian novel, even one as nice as Less, would possibly attend the match, however decorum dictated that it ought to stay seated quietly within the stands.

Poppycock.

Greer has introduced the identical iconoclastic verve to his new guide, Villa Coco, about an indomitable baronessa in Italy. If you suppose “charming” is a dismissive, diminutive praise, wait until you see that time period restored to its authentic enchantment. Villa Coco isn’t mere ice cream; it’s stracciatella gelato served in one of the stunning locations on earth.

The story involves us as a reminiscence polished for years to deliver out its comedian sheen. Near the top of the twentieth century, when the narrator is a rudderless school graduate clutching a level in Archives and Record Management, his mother and father insist he start taking life significantly. And so, like Ferdinand initially of Love’s Labour’s Lost, he swears off romance and commits himself solely to work of consequence.

An commercial for an assistant in Italy appears to vow simply the labor he wants. The duties embrace dictation, pruning, searching weasels and cataloging the contents of a rustic home.

He doesn’t converse Italian — or hunt weasels — however how laborious may it’s?

All he is aware of is that he’s led a fastidiously protected life, “cosseted as a Pekingese,” and he’s prepared for one thing. “Was it adventure I craved?” he wonders. “Having never had any real challenge or adventure, how did I know I wanted it?”

As he confirmed in Less and its sequel Less is Lost, Greer is a grasp of confusion, the sort of rolling bafflement that picks up twigs and small animals because it crashes alongside. Even earlier than he reaches Tuscany, his host has confused his identify with the date of his arrival, so he shall ceaselessly be generally known as Giovedì or Thursday. No try and set the file straight — or to set something straight — will ever work at Villa Coco.

His employer, the 92-year-old Baronessa, greets him by shouting “Koo-koo!” after which declaring, “You’re not blond!”

For the primary of many occasions, Giovedì thinks, “I was utterly confused.”

“Hiring you was a necessity,” she broadcasts. “Crusoe had his Friday. You are my man Thursday.”

I requested Andrew Sean Greer, “What can a comic novel do that a tragic novel can’t?”

A faint aroma of Alice in Wonderland wafts by these pages, strengthened by Greer’s elegant felicity with non sequiturs. Though launched as “an esteemed archivist,” Giovedì has no thought what precisely he’s being requested to do. (The Baronessa is dissatisfied to find on the second day that he has nonetheless not discovered Italian.) There are imprecise allusions to organizing her possessions — however to what finish? And why do work and different objects appear to be disappearing? The home, he notes, seems “both like the British Museum and like a child’s bedroom, filled with beloved trash and treasures.”

“Queens have visited this house,” the Baronessa claims. “Mick Jagger once came. There have been Nobel Prize winners and movie stars. This might be the most glamorous shit in Southern Europe.”

“She terrified me,” Giovedì thinks as he wonders “if this was all a terrible mistake.”

It could also be a mistake, but it surely’s additionally a most pleasant and unlikely romantic comedy — the absurd relationship between a younger homosexual American and an historic Italian lady who bosses him round as if he’s a Nineteenth-century maggiordomo. “I was, in a sense, trapped at Villa Coco.” He pretends to thoughts; you’ll not.

The story, Greer notes in a letter to readers, is loosely impressed by his friendship with an precise and, one hopes, extra moral baronessa. But plot, together with some loopy intrigue, is a really secondary concern right here. The creator, just like the Baronessa, is a grasp of entertaining delay. The actual pleasure is watching these two spar over her weird tales.

She as soon as went on a crusing journey to Zanzibar with a princess. “Before we left,” the Baronessa remembers, “she also fell in love with a monkey.”

“I don’t understand,” Giovedì says.

“Then you have never known a monkey!”

When the Baronessa shouldn’t be telling some unusual anecdote, she’s scheming to create one, and Giovedì is scrambling to catch up in an acceptable outfit. (No, not that one.) The complete contraption is held collectively by the stress between his irritation and his affection for this ridiculous and noteworthy lady who is aware of precisely what she desires and has the pressure of will to make it occur.

In addition to the beautiful setting, there’s additionally a scrumptious solid of quirky servants, family members, and neighbors who should be making Masterpiece Theatre producers salivate. My favourite, the handyman, is a former monk from Lebanon who, like Martin Short in Father of the Bride, no person can perceive. In one in all many priceless scenes, the Baronessa strains to understand his gibberish after which broadcasts, “What a wonderful idea! He wants to make a wall of dogs!”

“How quickly,” Giovedì thinks, “one enters into the madness of others.”

And how rapidly one falls beneath the spell of this good summer season diversion a few younger man making an attempt to determine what sort of “life of consequence” he’s going to steer. Though he renounced romance earlier than coming to Italy, everyone knows that’s a promise as flaky and attractive as a sfogliatella.

Late within the novel, there’s a stunning passage in regards to the Baronessa’s appreciation for an excellent story — which I think expresses Greer’s personal aesthetic precept:

“The comedy I heard so often in her own stories was not at all the shallowness of a rich woman with nothing to worry her,” he writes, “but the fierce gaiety of a woman who would not let tragedy bend her.” Laughter isn’t simple, it’s important. It’s concerted resistance towards despair and meaninglessness. “It is the work of a metallurgist to extract the gold from a clump of earth, and so it was the work of the speaker, I understood at last, to extract and refine, from the admixed events of love and life, the comedy.”

“Years from now,” a buddy tells Giovedì, “you will realize this is a funny story.”

How fortunate we’re to be residing in that point.◆

Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer (Doubleday, 270 pp., $30)

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