Andrew Sean Greer Under the Tuscan Fun
In “Villa Coco,” a young American goes to Italy for serious work and finds himself trapped in a delightful comedy.
The Tuesday Review
In 2018, hours after Andrew Sean Greer won a Pulitzer Prize for Less, I got him on the phone in Italy and asked if he was surprised.
“Oh, come on,” he shot back. “Everyone was surprised!”
True.
Not that we were disappointed — not at all. But there was an abiding sense, sure as death, that serious honors were reserved for serious books. A great comic novel, even one as great as Less, might attend the tournament, but decorum dictated that it should remain seated quietly in the stands.
Poppycock.
Greer has brought the same iconoclastic verve to his new book, Villa Coco, about an indomitable baronessa in Italy. If you think “charming” is a dismissive, diminutive compliment, wait till you see that term restored to its original enchantment. Villa Coco isn’t mere ice cream; it’s stracciatella gelato served in one of the most beautiful places on earth.
The story comes to us as a memory polished for years to bring out its comic sheen. Near the end of the 20th century, when the narrator is a rudderless college graduate clutching a degree in Archives and Record Management, his parents insist he begin taking life seriously. And so, like Ferdinand at the start of Love’s Labour’s Lost, he swears off romance and commits himself only to work of consequence.
An advertisement for an assistant in Italy seems to promise just the labor he needs. The duties include dictation, pruning, hunting weasels and cataloging the contents of a country house.
He doesn’t speak Italian — or hunt weasels — but how hard could it be?
All he knows is that he’s led a carefully protected life, “cosseted as a Pekingese,” and he’s ready for something. “Was it adventure I craved?” he wonders. “Having never had any real challenge or adventure, how did I know I wanted it?”
As he showed in Less and its sequel Less is Lost, Greer is a master of confusion, the kind of rolling bafflement that picks up twigs and small animals as it crashes along. Even before he reaches Tuscany, his host has confused his name with the date of his arrival, so he shall forever be known as Giovedì or Thursday. No attempt to set the record straight — or to set anything straight — will ever work at Villa Coco.
His employer, the 92-year-old Baronessa, greets him by shouting “Koo-koo!” and then declaring, “You’re not blond!”
For the first of many times, Giovedì thinks, “I was utterly confused.”
“Hiring you was a necessity,” she announces. “Crusoe had his Friday. You are my man Thursday.”
I asked Andrew Sean Greer, “What can a comic novel do that a tragic novel can’t?”
A faint aroma of Alice in Wonderland wafts through these pages, reinforced by Greer’s elegant felicity with non sequiturs. Though introduced as “an esteemed archivist,” Giovedì has no idea what exactly he’s being asked to do. (The Baronessa is disappointed to discover on the second day that he has still not learned Italian.) There are vague allusions to organizing her possessions — but to what end? And why do paintings and other objects seem to be disappearing? The house, he notes, looks “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 may be a mistake, but it’s also a most delightful and unlikely romantic comedy — the absurd relationship between a young gay American and an ancient Italian woman who bosses him around as though he’s a 19th-century maggiordomo. “I was, in a sense, trapped at Villa Coco.” He pretends to mind; you will not.
The story, Greer notes in a letter to readers, is loosely inspired by his friendship with an actual and, one hopes, more ethical baronessa. But plot, along with some crazy intrigue, is a very secondary concern here. The author, like the Baronessa, is a master of entertaining delay. The real pleasure is watching these two spar over her bizarre stories.
She once went on a sailing adventure 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 is not telling some strange anecdote, she’s scheming to create one, and Giovedì is scrambling to catch up in an appropriate outfit. (No, not that one.) The whole contraption is held together by the tension between his irritation and his affection for this ridiculous and remarkable woman who knows exactly what she wants and has the force of will to make it happen.
In addition to the gorgeous setting, there’s also a delicious cast of quirky servants, relatives, and neighbors who must be making Masterpiece Theatre producers salivate. My favorite, the handyman, is a former monk from Lebanon who, like Martin Short in Father of the Bride, nobody can understand. In one of many priceless scenes, the Baronessa strains to comprehend his gibberish and then announces, “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 quickly one falls under the spell of this perfect summer diversion about a young man trying to figure out what kind of “life of consequence” he’s going to lead. Though he renounced romance before coming to Italy, we all know that’s a promise as flaky and tasty as a sfogliatella.
Late in the novel, there’s a lovely passage about the Baronessa’s appreciation for a good story — which I suspect expresses Greer’s own aesthetic principle:
“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 easy, it’s essential. It’s concerted resistance against 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 friend tells Giovedì, “you will realize this is a funny story.”
How lucky we are to be living in that time.◆
Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer (Doubleday, 270 pp., $30)
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The line about comedy as the work of a metallurgist is great. Extracting gold from the admixed events of love and life. As an Italian, I can confirm: that fierce gaiety is not performance. It is a survival mechanism developed over centuries. Greer found the real Italy.
This is the next book in my Kindle reading list. I was going to read it; but after finishing Ann Pachett’s wonderful Whistler, I realized I’d never read her book, The Patron Saint of Liars. What a treasure Ann Pachett is to those of us who love to read. Thank you for your column.