Scotland on Sunday // The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer
Faber & Faber, £10.99
Fantastic voyage to salad days of old age
By Andrew Ervin
THE term ‘magical realism’, as we usually understand it, won’t strictly adhere to The Confessions of Max Tivoli, even though it does appear to juggle the traditional conventions of both realism and fantasy. Here, Andrew Sean Greer marks a stylistic territory all his own, one more freakish than magical.
Our hero, Max Tivoli, was born in 1871 with the appearance of a 70-year-old man. As he grows older, his body ages backwards in time. "By the time I was twenty-five, I seemed to be in my mid-forties: plump and elegant with waxed mustaches. I looked like my mother’s generation. In 1895, in fact, we appeared to meet each other’s age and, nodding as we passed, continued in our opposite directions towards age and youth, respectively." Strange mother-son relations colour much of the proceedings.
The complicated love story that follows from Greer’s strange premise resists full recapitulation. Set primarily in San Francisco, the novel takes the form of Max’s long letter, written in babyish old age and addressed to a child named Sammy. "I could never write a true story of my childhood, because everything happened before I knew what time was."
As an elderly-looking teenager, Max falls in love with his downstairs neighbour, a young girl named Alice. She, for obvious reasons, does not exactly share his affections, and her mother packs up the house and moves them far away. Years later, Max meets Alice for a second time. She, of course, has grown older but he appears so much younger that she doesn’t recognise him. Max invents a false name - Asgar Van Daler - and a new life story, and this time the literally earth-shattering event happens: they fall in love. Cue the earthquake that destroys most of the city, and Alice’s family fortune.
The occasional lapse from pathos to bathos undermines Greer’s story from time to time; yet his prose is so wonderfully evocative and his overall project so bold that he earns every benefit of the doubt.
Max and Alice move apart again in different chronological and spatial directions until a third meeting late in life unites them once again under even stranger circumstances. The Freudians, physicists and freak-show enthusiasts among us will find much to appreciate in the book’s concluding chapters.
If you are looking for straight-up realism, stick with Henry James. For fantasy and escapism, there is always that new Bill Clinton book. But for something new - or at least for a clever new arrangement of the old - look no further. Greer’s is that rare, brilliant novel capable of delivering far more than it promises.
Fantastic voyage to salad days of old age
By Andrew Ervin
THE term ‘magical realism’, as we usually understand it, won’t strictly adhere to The Confessions of Max Tivoli, even though it does appear to juggle the traditional conventions of both realism and fantasy. Here, Andrew Sean Greer marks a stylistic territory all his own, one more freakish than magical.
Our hero, Max Tivoli, was born in 1871 with the appearance of a 70-year-old man. As he grows older, his body ages backwards in time. "By the time I was twenty-five, I seemed to be in my mid-forties: plump and elegant with waxed mustaches. I looked like my mother’s generation. In 1895, in fact, we appeared to meet each other’s age and, nodding as we passed, continued in our opposite directions towards age and youth, respectively." Strange mother-son relations colour much of the proceedings.
The complicated love story that follows from Greer’s strange premise resists full recapitulation. Set primarily in San Francisco, the novel takes the form of Max’s long letter, written in babyish old age and addressed to a child named Sammy. "I could never write a true story of my childhood, because everything happened before I knew what time was."
As an elderly-looking teenager, Max falls in love with his downstairs neighbour, a young girl named Alice. She, for obvious reasons, does not exactly share his affections, and her mother packs up the house and moves them far away. Years later, Max meets Alice for a second time. She, of course, has grown older but he appears so much younger that she doesn’t recognise him. Max invents a false name - Asgar Van Daler - and a new life story, and this time the literally earth-shattering event happens: they fall in love. Cue the earthquake that destroys most of the city, and Alice’s family fortune.
The occasional lapse from pathos to bathos undermines Greer’s story from time to time; yet his prose is so wonderfully evocative and his overall project so bold that he earns every benefit of the doubt.
Max and Alice move apart again in different chronological and spatial directions until a third meeting late in life unites them once again under even stranger circumstances. The Freudians, physicists and freak-show enthusiasts among us will find much to appreciate in the book’s concluding chapters.
If you are looking for straight-up realism, stick with Henry James. For fantasy and escapism, there is always that new Bill Clinton book. But for something new - or at least for a clever new arrangement of the old - look no further. Greer’s is that rare, brilliant novel capable of delivering far more than it promises.
posted by Andrew Ervin at
7/04/2004
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