Villa Coco (5*)

What I feared might be a silly book turned out to be a profound one with just the right amount of madcap shenanigans.

They lived in a sealed world of comic-strip logic, and within that world, all schemes ended as happily as a monkey’s life in Zanzibar.

A young gay archivist at loose ends in a rotary-phone world accepts a temporary job in Tuscany cataloging what seem to be the ever changing contents of Villa Coco, imperiously ruled by a self-made Baronessa entirely set in her nonagenarian ways.  Although author Andrew Sean Greer withholds his narrator's name until the end of the novel, she insists on calling him Giovedi--Italian for Thursday, the day of his arrival--and demands that he learn the language.  He accedes, a little grudgingly, with the empathic counsel of Oscar, the Baronessa's oldest friend.  Discreetly gay, he also delivers an ambiguous warning that Giovedi nearly misinterprets:  "Do not be lazy in love."

Although the formerly randy narrator has sworn off sex for the duration of his mostly rural sojourn--described so evocatively you will want to make good on your threats to self-deport from 21st century America--the childless, always scheming Baronessa has other plans.  She insists he take a brief road trip with Giacomo, her handsome and married cousin (in the European way) to Commachio, a charming village unknown to tourists where their dilapidated Mitsu-Bitchy breaks down.

What would it be like, to know you were secretly Venice? I envied the town, though of course in the canals were not gondolas but the local specialty—eels—which made the waters wriggle slightly in their courses. Yes, eels. They were the basis of the town’s famous cuisine and were its familiar spirits, beloved, much the way other towns cherish their swallows or poplars or stags; if it had been an American town, the local high school team would have been the Fighting Eels.

Giovedi couldn't be farther from America at Villa Coco where the plumbing is primitive and everything has a provenance, especially the people who surround him and whose old world values begin to shape his identity.

One can find the experience, in America, of standing where it seems no person has ever stood before—on a wilderness peak or a rocky, inaccessible shore—but seldom do we feel that thousands have stood there, for thousands of years, and empires have risen and fallen and will continue to do so long after we have gone.

During his formative expatriation, Giovedi faces some difficult choices, particularly after he meets his older doppelganger by chance in a cafe and he can't quite shake his predicted future. Should he embrace his alluring new lifestyle or should he return to America in pursuit of a real career and relationship?  For what he initially believes to be solely selfish reasons, the Baronessa counsels him against leaving.

“You would start thinking again that literature began with Hemingway and art with Warhol. That the fate of the world depends upon your presidential election. That a proper dinner conversation is to discuss your favorite television shows. Like every American, you would lose—”

“Really?” I broke in, irritated. “What would I lose?”

She looked at me at last. “Your sense of humor.”

Humor matters to the Baronessa no less than to Greer.   When Giovedi decides his next move after a disastrous visit to Florence "to see a Caravaggio"--forbidden by the Baronessa--he finally opens up to her, confessing his hearbreak.  She responds with the kind of advice that perfectly captures the generous impetus of Greer's novels, particularly at a moment in time when storytelling faces grave threats both technical and political.

You must tell it again another time, she had said on our way to Ferrara. Made better, not just for the sake of the listener but for the sake of the teller. To have mastered the story. It is the work of the 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.

Villa Coco comes to a most satsifying end with an unanticipated train ride to Venice.  By this time Giovedi has become less and less American, almost like a Henry James character but one shorn of cynicism rather than innocence by his stay abroad.  We learn his real name just as he experiences an epiphany.

The price for seeing things as they really are. It is our youth.