Subject
Fw: With a nod to Nabokov ...
From
Date
Body
----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy P. Klein
To: spklein52@hotmail.com
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 11:14 PM
Subject: With a nod to Nabokov ...
UPDATED TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2004 2:09 AM ET
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/30/books/30GREE.html
Andrew Sean Greer has found success with "The Confessions of Max Tivoli."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
March 30, 2004
A Character in Reverse, an Author in the Clouds
By MEL GUSSOW
he title character in Andrew Sean Greer's ingenious new novel, "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," is born old ≈ looking like an aged gnome ≈ and grows younger as he becomes older. At 60 he is playing in a sandbox with other children. In a review in The New Yorker, John Updike wrote, "Like Proust, Greer presents life as essentially a solitude, an ever-renewed exile from the present, a shifting set of gorgeous mirages that nothing but descriptive genius can hold fast."
When that passage was quoted to Mr. Greer in a recent interview, he said, " `Like Proust comma Greer.' Oh, my god!" And he beamed.
At 33, with his third book and second novel, Andrew Sean Greer is a sudden success, surrounded by critical acclaim. Soon "Max Tivoli" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) will be published in countries around the world.
Introducing Mr. Greer at a reading at the Strand Rare Book Room in Manhattan, the author Peter Carey said: "This is someone who not only has the nerve to imagine a love story about a man born old and aging backward, but a writer not afraid of emotion. He may even make you cry."
All this has left the author astonished. Could this really be happening? It is a question that could also be asked about Max Tivoli himself. But the book is more than a clever idea. With a nod to Nabokov, it focuses on an older man's obsession with a young girl (from 14 onward). The novel is an open field for cultural sleuths, with references, some hidden, to other works.
Mr. Greer is candid about the precedents: F. Scott Fitzgerald told a related story in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," and that in turn was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. Later Fitzgerald found "an almost identical plot" in Samuel Butler's "Note-books." In "The Sword and the Stone," which Mr. Greer read as a child, Merlin ages backward. Mr. Greer carries it further back, to Greek mythology, and forward to "Mork & Mindy," in which Jonathan Winters played a baby. And at one book signing, he said, a reader asked him if he knew about the "Star Trek" episode in which ≈≈
Actually, when he began the book he was thinking more of Bob Dylan. In 2001, having published a collection of stories and in the middle of writing a novel, he found himself singing "My Back Pages" ≈ "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now" ≈ and he had what amounted to an epiphany. "I thought that could be a book not like anything I'd written before," he said. "It sounded like a wild adventure that no one's going to want to read, but it could be a lot of fun, and maybe that's the point of it."
After finishing the novel "The Path of Minor Planets" (which was published by Picador in September 2001 and was promptly ignored in the wake of 9/11), he plunged into the book that became "The Confessions of Max Tivoli." Eventually Mr. Dylan disappeared and the epigraph went to Proust.
With all the comparisons, the book stands alone as a period novel set at the turn of the 20th century. It deals with time as the great leveler and, in the Beckettian sense, the proximity of birth and death. It is also about people who, in Mr. Greer's words, "redeal the deck" and make drastic alterations in their lives.
Asked if he wanted to redeal the deck, he said: "In my life? I'm getting a redeal right now," from obscurity to celebrity. "Any gay man in America redeals a deck at some point."
Born in Washington, he is an identical twin, and his brother, Michael, is also a novelist, as yet unpublished. Their parents are chemists. Does having a twin lead him to think in double images? "Mike lives in Brooklyn, and he has a lovely girlfriend," he said. "I get to see in him the life I might have lived." He added, "That's what I do when I write stories."
Andrew Greer has been writing since he was a child. "I would write these novels about bullies in school: `The Bullies: a Novel,' " he said. He recalled that his fifth-grade teacher, a Mrs. Poppy, gave him an A-plus-plus on a mini-novel and said, "I can't wait until I read your real first novel."
He wrote a book at 16 in imitation of "Wuthering Heights" and, several years later, his own version of "The Accidental Tourist." This was part of the learning process. "It's an old-fashioned idea to copy the old masters in the art museum," he said. "My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place."
At Brown University he studied with Robert Coover and Edmund White, and he credited Mr. Coover ("He encouraged us to do anything but a conventional narrative") and Mr. White for having "such an intelligent mind about literature." Mr. Coover, speaking on the telephone, remembered Mr. Greer as "a stylish young writer who had a biting wit."
After graduating, Mr. Greer came to New York, lived in the West Village and supported his writing with a series of temporary jobs: taking reservations at a restaurant, working as an extra on "Saturday Night Live" and, most of all, serving as a private chauffeur.
He sent his stories to The New Yorker and elsewhere and was met with repeated rejection. "I heard you had to get 200 rejections before you got published," he said, and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. With very little money, on the brink of having to take a real job ≈ if he could find one ≈ he decided to go to graduate school at the University of Montana. It was, he said, "a turning point."
At first he wrote wildly experimental stories. Then, almost as an act of defiance, he wrote one that was "plain narrative from beginning to end." The story, "Come Live With Me and Be My Love," was published in Ploughshares magazine. Soon his stories were appearing in Esquire and The Paris Review, and on the basis of still another (unpublished) novel he found an agent.
For two years he lived in Seattle, where he wrote a story a month, and for the past six years he has been in San Francisco, where he began writing "Max Tivoli." Explaining his choice of subject, he said: "You want to write the book that fills some gap on the bookshelf. I think Toni Morrison said that. I think I had been searching for the book that would be like a modern `Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' that would have some metaphorical jumping-off point."
Deciding to set it in period, he began doing research at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. From the first he had the title (as a child he had visited Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen and loved it) and the opening sentence, "We are each the love of someone's life."
To clarify the complex timeline, he kept a chart on his computer: "how old Max was, how old he seemed to be, how old everyone else was and historical events that were happening." In the process characters changed. About Max, he said, "I think of him as being incredibly selfish, pompous and self pitying, but of course I love him because I love writing as him," which he does in the first person. "Max is someone outside the normal passage of time who can see every detail of life with a vividness and a pleasure, so that he is able to say at the end that life is short and full of sorrows, and I loved it."
As for Alice, the woman with whom Max is obsessed, at first she was "shy and bookish, and it was hard to believe he would fall in love with her." Instead he made her "a woman in the wrong time who had to do anything she could to make a life for herself."
Mr. Greer says that the essence of the novel is something apart from its basic plot. For him it is about "a sense of being perceived as something different, or the experience of looking in the mirror and not being shocked at seeing someone old when you don't see yourself that way." As Max's mother advises her son, "Be what they think you are."
To his surprise online it has been called a romance novel, and mystery bookstores are ordering copies. He said he did not regard it as either a romance or a mystery, although it has aspects of both genres. "For me," he said, "it's like having a conversation with myself about growing old and the nature of growing old," and, almost as an afterthought, "about love."
He expressed his eagerness to get back to working on his next novel. "It's nothing like `Max Tivoli,' " he said, "but it's still about the passage of time." Like Proust comma Greer.
RELATED
First Chapter: 'The Confessions of Max Tivoli' (February 8, 2004)
READERS' OPINIONS
Forum: Join a Discussion on Book News and Reviews
UPDATED TUESDAY, MARCH 30, 2004 2:09 AM ET
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/30/books/30GREE.html
The New York Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Find a broadband plan that fits. Great local deals on high-speed Internet access.