The Tuscan hills serve as the backdrop for Andrew Sean Greer's latest novel, Villa Coco, a lighthearted and witty story of self-discovery. The Pulitzer-winning author of Less crafts a breezy confection of fish-out-of-water humor, insecurity, and personal growth set in an Italian paradise.
The story begins with the line: "There's a place in Italy in need of someone. Why don't you look into that?" Inspired by his own two-year stint directing a writers' residency at the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside Florence, Greer launches a hapless, clueless innocent into the Tuscan hills and the embrace of its eccentric aristocracy, embodied by the eponymous Coco, Baronessa Lisabetta.
The narrator, known variously as "our young man," Gio, and Giovedi, arrives at Villa Coco to serve as the Baronessa's "adjutant." His duties include pruning roses, emptying drains, hunting the Baronessa's mortal enemy—the pine marten—and cataloguing the dilapidated villa's contents. Among the camel saddles and hat racks, he is assured, lurk priceless works of art, including a Picasso and a Botticelli. He joins a staff consisting of a Sri Lankan cook, her husband, and a Lebanese factotum, all sharing in the Sisyphean task of keeping Villa Coco running and the Baronessa out of harm's way.
The Baronessa, at 92, remains convinced that her best years are still ahead, while feigning deafness and blindness when it suits her. Along with his other duties, our young man must navigate Coco's entourage. There is the charming bohemian neighbor Estelle and Coco's formidable whisky-drinking friend Pippa, a Venetian princess. There are relatives, dogs (disdainful pugs Gorky and Pushkin, and adoring truffle hound Cesare—Greer is very good at animals), lovers of lovers, and shady acquaintances, most of whom seem determined to bring the household into disrepute.
Gio, who has taken a vow of celibacy to maintain focus, finds himself alarmed by the sinuously predatory southern gentleman Furman Childress ("Ah was her friend's paramour") and charmed by faded Genoese aesthete Oscar, who gently dispenses romantic advice ("we must find you an Italian man"). But the trickiest to handle is the most sweetly buttoned-up: the Baronessa's cousin Giacomo, stern but youthful, handsome but married, commissioned to accompany Gio on a mysterious errand but seemingly also recruited to seduce our young man from the straight and narrow. Behind all these apparently chaotic introductions and excursions into Italy's hinterlands, it gradually becomes clear that the Baronessa has a precisely mapped course in mind that may land our young man in more trouble than he is ready for.
In his preface, Greer states his aim unequivocally: he wishes to write a "charm novel," a book as soothing as a warm bath, funny but nourishing, with "a sliver of hope." The times are certainly propitious for such an ambition. He offers a hostage to fortune by naming Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene's "entertainments" as his paragons, but while this book certainly charms, it is nothing like them. Greer's young man is enchanted by Italians in full admission of his ignorance, whereas Mitford knew her subject—the English upper classes—inside and out. His tale also veers too close to whimsy, with a multiplicity of nicknames—even the car is a "Mitsu-bitchy."
Greer does not have Mitford's merrily lethal edge, nor the wicked sophistication of Greene, nor their skill in lifting material free from lived experience. Instead, and it is a credit to the sincerity of his emotional response, Greer offers a fine eye for Italy's outrageous beauty. He gives us "the gold-green waters" of the Po delta and valleys full of white butterflies, while a description of the Grand Canal in fog is quite lovely: "a misty passage from which phantoms appeared—of pilings, rusted gates, lamp-posts, once the carved head of some drowned god." He is unashamedly sentimental, and though his other characters pale in her shadow, the Baronessa, with her stories, machinations, loyalty, wit, and courage, casts the requisite spell—delivering an enchantment threaded through with hope.
Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer is published by Sceptre. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
