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Articles and Reviews: BOOKS
The Confessions of Max Tivoli
By Andrew Sean Greer
Given the beauty of the prose of
this novel, which almost cries out to be called well-wrought
and delicately nuanced, and effortlessly accomplishes
the difficult feat of being both finely tuned yet
other-worldly, precise yet ethereal (the style is
evidently catching), it is difficult to know where
to begin summarising the narrative in a truncated
review. That would very nearly spoil things, it seems.
For the secret to the success of this novel lies almost
entirely in the dandified, disenchanted voice of its
most unusual narrator, which harks back to the long,
meditative, essayistic style inaugurated by Proust
and brought to fruition by Nabokov. This is no small
achievement for a contemporary author, since it would
be so easy to get it wrong and look stupid, and requires
balancing precariously on a tight rope between profundity
and parody. And yet, to place the emphasis thus is
to denigrate the sad enchantment of the very singular
story.
So, what’s it all about, then? ‘We are
each the love of someone’s life’ declares
Max Tivoli in the opening sentence, and so it proves.
Unfortunately, that love is rarely reciprocated. When
Max is born in San Francisco in September 1871, he
has the external physical appearance of an old, dying
man. Yet, as he ages, his body grows younger. If he
looks seventy when he’s born, and lives his
allotted threescore and ten, then he will die in 1941.
His grandmother has the numerals of this year engraved
on a gold pendent that he will wear around his neck,
as a sort of memento mori, just to remind
him. This peculiar condition also means that the only
time his body and mind will be in total chronological
concord is when he is in and around thirty-five.
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Max’s appearance being constantly
at variance with his inner life leads to all sorts of
complications, as you can imagine, not least among which
is the contretemps caused by his falling for fourteen
year old neighbour girl Alice when she is fourteen and
he a healthy, wholesome, budding boy of seventeen, but
looking like a dirty old man of fifty-three. As he writes
this memoir, he is forced to endure the indignity of
reciting his times tables in primary school, even though
he is pushing sixty. ‘Be what they think you are’
is his mother’s advice about how to get through
his life, and mostly he heeds her, exceptions occurring
in the case of the aforementioned Alice – whom,
in a middle-aged guise, he goes on to marry, and later
still, in a further deception, becomes her adopted son
– and with his lifelong friend, Hughie. Max loved
Alice, but Alice really loved Hughie who, in turn, having
his own secret, really loved Max. ‘We are each
the love of someone’s life’, indeed.
With its atmospheric evocation of turn of the century
San Francisco, and an extended road trip reminiscent
of Humbert Humbert aimlessly dragging Dolores Haze through
the American heartland, these confessions have more
than enough to keep your interest from flagging. But
its greatest achievement is that far from feeling outré,
the irony is that Max’s predicament merely represents
our own in extremis: wanting to be older when
we are young, and wanting to be younger when we are
old.
First published in the Irish Independent
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