Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco Turns Every Digression Into A Disarming Trick

Pulitzer Prize winner Andrew Sean Greer’s latest novel, Villa Coco, is a smorgasbord of delight. The opening comment on a Tuscan train station could be applied to the book itself. It seems “so fanciful you might unwrap it and find it was chocolate”. The novel has the kind of indefatigable loveliness that’s difficult to sustain beyond a certain stretch, but Greer has hit a sweet spot. The narrative launchpad is familiar. The protagonist finds himself on alien shores, seemingly caught in far deeper entanglements than initial reckoning. To this, Greer brings a spry touch that instantly pulls us in. Villa Coco is awash with such charm, humour and easy wit it’s pure joy to dart from one breezy sentence to the next. Its happy accidents keep the wheel turning in a surprisingly humane juxtaposition of two lives: one apparently winding down, the other staring at the horizon.

A recent college graduate, the protagonist lands in Tuscany to be an assistant of Baronessa Lisabetta or, “Coco”, who has more than a few tricks up her sleeve. There’s ample confusion over the narrator’s name. Coco liberally rechristens him as Giovedi, her "Man Thursday". The narrator initially protests when others too stick to it, but late resigns himself. Though he often prides himself on being organised, Coco, as he soon discovers, has an impulse for ecstatic disarray. He might plot something only to be promptly thrown off course by her thrilling, maddening random decisions. This is a beautifully life-affirming novel, holding close its precious secrets.

The stream of little stories and anecdotes Greer regales us with create a strong wish that they never run out. The prose is effortlessly buoyant. Greer rolls out a dizzyingly long carpet of foibles, but he’s never slighting anyone in his ensemble. Instead, it’s the protagonist who’s constantly confronted with his narrow view of the world. Frequently, he catches himself in his misjudgements. Early on, he shades himself for being a “self-centred, parochial, cliché-added fool”. The novel is tilted through the prism of memory. The narrator is recalling those months when he was flung under the Baronessa’s charismatic shadow. To be riveted by her yarns on her long life of rich, foreign travels is where Greer bears all the world’s capacity for astonishment. The novel is about the friendships we cultivate through our lives, including those that rose from utter chance.

A twenty-one-year-old American, the narrator was “still young enough” to change, “like a fresco as the artist reconsiders the position of a saint, but the moment was coming when they would be set forever”. He’s at a point of life where much of himself is yet to be shaped out. This can be both liberating and mildly terrifying. It’s the early 1990s. He has embarked with a typical US-centric pose, the grand unravelling of which is set into motion by the Baronessa. She’s as whimsical as stubborn in orchestrating events to follow her bidding. She seems determined to ruffle his penchant for order. He came for cataloguing the scores of antiquities, curios in the estate. Coco steers him towards other duties. As he progresses from annoyance to submission, Villa Coco spins an enthralling journey. Each odd bend of the road throws up surprise. Coco dares the narrator to catch up with her. Breathlessly, he tries to please her, earn her admiration, whereas she struts ahead, planning the next small trip.

His relationship with her expectedly shifts from genuine bafflement and exasperation to an endearment that’s defensive. It’s a form of love that might be a tad slanted but grows quietly and resolutely. The narrator is mystified when he first arrives in the villa, disoriented by her peculiar temperament, volatile expectations. The narrator’s early faith in working as an archivist is quickly jolted. The Baronessa gleefully tramples his plans with entitlement that might have come off as obnoxious if it wasn’t so ridiculously diverting. She seems to have her own grand scheme, which she won’t let him in. He must swiftly learn Italian, immerse himself in the land’s refinements and culture. Greer writes with wide-eyed relish about Italy’s food, architecture, designs, art. There’s the all-consuming, hypnotised curiosity of a stranger being acquainted with new pleasures. In her idiosyncratic style, Coco nudges the narrator to shake off rigidities, stalk the unknown. He’s too wary and systematic. She casts it all askew. Much of the novel’s cheekiness springs from what the narrator initially sees as misadventures, which ultimately become a roadmap for a more unbound future. The impish Oscar, the elderly gay man, who’s best friends with the Baronessa, is as unforgettable, dispensing love lessons to the narrator with casual grace.

At ninety-two, Baronessa is simply unstoppable, an incorrigible force who demands life to shuffle as per her will. She storms off the pages and right into our hearts. It’s one of those irresistible characters whose vanities, impetuousness and fits command attention from the get-go. It’s only later he realises she doesn’t have “the shallowness of a rich woman with nothing to worry her”, rather “the fierce gaiety of a woman who would not let tragedy bend her”. Greer graphs a move from the narrator’s bewilderment to attachment that startles him. Even the narrator’s vow of chastity breaks, thanks to Coco’s cousin, Giacomo, who’s in a marriage of convenience and demurely asks him to move in with him. Villa Coco is strewn with such proposals and recollections that feel distinctly bizarre on first encounter. However, they wend into a believable shape, if we choose to be fanciful and light-footed instead of stiffly intransigent. Villa Coco luxuriates in beauty, sheer sensuousness of life. It can still entrance if we surrender to the sway.