VILLA COCO, by Andrew Sean Greer<\/p>\n
Early in my journalism career, I had a notoriously mercurial boss, who when reading a manuscript he was growing impatient with would slash through a particularly offending paragraph with a red pen and angrily scrawl in the margin, \u201cI stopped reading here!\u201d<\/p>\n
I had almost that same reaction with Andrew Sean Greer\u2019s<\/a> latest novel, \u201cVilla Coco,\u201d when I came across this gratingly cloying sentence: \u201cThe little Tuscan train station, brown shutters against yellow paint, seemed so fanciful you might unwrap it and find it was chocolate.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfortunately, that was the first line. But I rightly decided it was way too early to abandon all hope of a good read to come.<\/p>\n \u201cVilla Coco\u201d is Greer\u2019s seventh novel and the second to follow \u201cLess,\u201d<\/a> which somewhat unexpectedly won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2018. The first to follow was its sequel, \u201cLess Is Lost,\u201d<\/a> which continued the comic odyssey of Arthur Less, a gay middle-aged author in search of both love and professional success.<\/p>\n With \u201cVilla Coco,\u201d Greer has introduced a new central character \u2014 a 21-year-old American, \u201call gangly, double-jointed limbs, waves of filbert hair and a raised-eyebrow expression of both innocence and arrogance\u201d \u2014 but one who will certainly feel familiar to readers of the \u201cLess\u201d books.<\/p>\n The story begins with our young narrator, fresh out of a liberal arts college and with no employment prospects, responding to a help-wanted ad for an archivist to come to Tuscany and catalog the contents of a \u201cmodest country home,\u201d including a Picasso. Soon he arrives in the small village of San Drago, both eager and nervous about meeting his employer, a 92-year-old Baronessa with a colorful past.<\/p>\n At their first encounter, she tells him that although everyone calls her Coco, her given name is Lisabetta \u2014 \u201cIt\u2019s from Boccaccio. She is the one who keeps her lover\u2019s severed head in a pot of basil.\u201d<\/p>\n It is a confusing time in the young man\u2019s life. Set in the 1990s\u2019 shadow of the AIDS epidemic, the central character \u2014 dubbed \u201cGiovedi\u201d by the Baronessa, a joking reference to him being her \u201cMan Thursday\u201d \u2014 has decided that it is time to bring a halt to his relatively late sexual awakening.<\/p>\n \u201cNo more men for a while,\u201d the narrator tells us. Instead, he would embrace \u201cthe bloodless precision of the archivist\u2019s life.\u201d (Greer has said the book is partly inspired by a \u201clife changing\u201d visit to a Tuscan writers\u2019 retreat and its founder, to whom \u201cVilla Coco\u201d is dedicated.)<\/p>\n We soon meet a cast of predictably eccentric characters: the imposing houseguest Pippa, an Italian princess said to be an elderly descendant of Queen Victoria; the somewhat mysterious Oscar, a silver-haired artist who darts in and out of the narrative and at one point regales our narrator with tales of his post-World War II sexual adventures with the village\u2019s various shepherds, winemakers and priests; and Estelle, the Baronessa\u2019s longtime friend and neighbor, who plays a deceptively important role in the story to come.<\/p>\n The two met when they discovered they were both sleeping with the same man. The romantic entanglements ended; the friendship endured.<\/p>\n Then comes the arrival of Giacomo, the Baronessa\u2019s handsome young cousin, striking fear in our narrator that his vow of celibacy will soon be tested. But then he learns, to his relief, that Giacomo has a wife back home: \u201cClearly I had dodged the arrow,\u201d he tells us. (It will come as no surprise that the men end up in bed together roughly 20 pages later.)<\/p>\n The archival work does not progress smoothly. Instead, the young man\u2019s time is mostly taken up by helping to repair a plugged-up sewer, learning Italian from the cook, watching episodes of a \u201cKojak\u201d-like Italian TV crime drama with the Baronessa and navigating an increasingly complicated relationship with Giacomo.<\/p>\n When he complains to Oscar that the Baronessa has been no help in his research, and that \u201cthere\u2019s something she isn\u2019t telling me,\u201d her longtime friend responds: \u201cYou must allow an old woman some mysteries!\u201d<\/p>\n None of this is particularly suspenseful \u2014 the novel\u2019s chief revelation is telegraphed about halfway through the story \u2014 but the writing is occasionally quite funny, and the tale of an expat\u2019s life in the gorgeous, seductive Italian countryside is engaging, as anyone who has seen a Merchant-Ivory film can tell you.<\/p>\n Near the end, Giovedi announces that his archival work is nearly done, which prompts a sudden, mysterious journey to Venice, minus Oscar. There, the full extent of the Baronessa\u2019s scheme is revealed \u2014 as well as why the young American\u2019s nationality proved so crucial to its execution.<\/p>\n Our narrator, now identified by his real name of Geoffrey, ends the book adrift \u2014 figuratively and literally \u2014 though it seems clear he will heed Oscar\u2019s advice about the Baronessa: \u201cYou have to think of her as a magic door. Every time you open it, it leads somewhere new.\u201d<\/p>\n VILLA COCO | By Andrew Sean Greer | Doubleday | 288 pp. | $30<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"VILLA COCO, by Andrew Sean Greer Early in my journalism career, I had a notoriously mercurial boss, who…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22536,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[15946,7981,15945,5,15947,15948],"class_list":["post-22535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-italy","tag-andrew-sean","tag-books-and-literature","tag-greer","tag-italy","tag-less-book","tag-villa-coco-book"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22535\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/italy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}