www.sfgate.com The last thing novelist Andrew Sean Greer expected was precisely what he got -- a literary blessing from icon John Updike
Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 3, 2004
San Francisco ChronicleURL: sfgate.com/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/02/03/DDGTN4M1H01.DTL
It's not every young novelist who wakes up to discover that his novel, born in equal parts of anguish and hope, has received the ultimate praise -- a rave in the New Yorker. It happened to Andrew Sean Greer, a San Francisco novelist whose brilliant and heartbreaking novel, "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," received the blessing of literary heavyweight John Updike.
"Resplendently poetic and loftily sorrowing," Updike calls the book, which tells the story of a man, born in San Francisco in 1871, who ages in reverse. "Rhinocerine" with wrinkles in his infancy, bearded and portly in his youth, Max gradually grows younger, slipping toward infancy as his spirit declines. In each phase, Max harbors an impossible love for Alice Levy, his downstairs neighbor in the then-posh South Park.
"His poignantly awry existence," Updike writes, "set out with such a wealth of verbal flourishes and gilded touches, serves as a heightened version of the strangeness, the muted disharmony of being human." If that wasn't enough, Updike invoked the names of giants. The book, he adds, "is enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov."
Greer's agent, Bill Clegg, knew the review was forthcoming but hadn't said a word in case it was negative. Sneakily, he arranged in advance to call Greer, on the pretext of making a dinner date. "I was innocently at home by the coffeemaker," recalls Greer, 33. "I of course thought we were talking about dinner, but he began: 'Forget about dinner, Andy, are you sitting down?' And he read it to me.
"It was an emotional ambush, of course, and he got what he wanted: I cried. It sounds ridiculous, but a serious review from John Updike is the kind of thing you never dream of getting. I mean, my last novel ('The Path of Minor Planets,' 2001) wasn't even reviewed by the New York Times. And this was my first real review (for 'Max Tivoli'). It was wonderful."
The first person Greer called was his identical twin brother, Michael, a fiction writer and Web designer in Brooklyn. A week later, Greer is standing in the kitchen of his Western Addition flat, boiling water for tea, still dazed by the Updike benediction. This is his first interview.
"My take is that he wasn't comparing me (to Proust and Nabokov), but noting my influences," says Greer, a tall, fair-skinned man with a boyish grin and an air of startled modesty. "And he's right on about what I was reading when I wrote the book. I read 'Lolita' over and over, and I read 'In Search of Lost Time' for the two years I spent writing the book."
"The Confessions of Max Tivoli" is a wondrous novel, shimmering with simultaneous chords of sadness, loss and enchantment. The book also fascinates in its textured view of pre-quake San Francisco, a city of "gilt-edged gas lamps and velvet walls." A city where Lotta Crabtree sang "leather-lunged" parodies of Jenny Lind, where sailors were shanghaied from Barbary Coast dives and children thrilled to Woodward's Gardens, a theme park of sorts (at Duboce and Mission) with dromedary rides, a racetrack, herds of emus and ostriches and a sad trained bear named Splitnose Jim. "In my research, all the cool stuff happened here in the 1880s and '90s," Greer says. "Just amazing."
Reared in suburban Maryland, schooled at Brown University and the University of Montana, Greer moved to San Francisco in 1998 with his partner, software trainer David Ross. He loves the city, like a true transplant, and says he had a great time researching the book at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Public Library.
His most useful materials were the diaries of Gelett Burgess, a bohemian poet who drank, smoked hashish, obsessed over girls and, more than a century later, provided Greer with a wealth of physical details: men taking their hats to be re-ribboned, women brushing the braid of their dresses to rid them of the soot and the grime of a city carpeted with horse manure.
That's the backdrop, but the essence of the book is the character's psychological journey. Exiled by his physical freakishness, Max numbs himself to life, believing that "melancholy is my birthright." Passion and fulfillment are fleeting; once experienced, he eagerly hoards them and makes them remembered fetishes, "coiled in the enamel locket of my heart."
Having read "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," one extrapolates, imagining that the story is close to the experience of its author. But fresh-faced, cheerful Greer is anything but a Proustian gloom-pot. Unlike Max or Nabokov's Humbert Humbert or Proust's autobiographical Marcel, he's happy in a stable relationship of eight years.
"I'm not despairing of love at all. (But) I remember that emotional state, that experience of being unloved." At 20, he dived into love rapturously and recklessly, like Max, and says he still "resounds" from its "horrifying" conclusion -- from losing something he'd latched onto too tightly.
Writing the book, he says, was "was full of great doubts and panic attacks" -- standard hell for any novelist. Finding Max's voice wasn't hard ("I could write like Max forever"), but when he approached the book's ending, "it was very upsetting. I actually had to get a little drunk to write the last 20 pages or so. I had to be alone a lot near the end."
Along with all the sadness and disconnection of Max's life and the way he represents a universal ennui, Greer says he wanted to convey the flip side of that mind set: the delight and surprise that often coexist with sadness and frequently help to define it.
"My friends who I've shown the book to are upset by how sad it is," he sighs. "But I think of it, oddly, as full of joy. I know that sounds very strange. I tried to make it full of detail that would show some sort of joy for existence, despite the impossibility of whatever Max was searching for."
A writer from childhood, Greer and his twin were raised by parents, both scientists, who loved to read. "I think they kind of stocked their bookshelves. My brother and I would go in and read their books. But there were children's books, too, and they would make it seem like we were discovering them for ourselves by putting them at kid level."
His first novel, written at 16, was a "Wuthering Heights" knockoff that he entered in a young adult novel competition. He lost: "I had never heard of 'young adult novels,' which I guess are about teenage gangs and the new boy in town or something." He kept trying, wrote "four or five" unpublished novels and finally scored a publishing deal with "How It Was for Me," a short story collection that came out in 2000, and "The Path of Minor Planets" the next year.
Now that he's received the blessing of Updike, Greer is having to navigate a new and surprising world, one in which he isn't the neophyte struggling for recognition but a recognized artist who's arrived, brilliantly, with an unforgettable novel.
Asked to name the first person who recognized his talent, Greer remembers: "My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Poppy, had us each write a 'novel,' whatever that meant to us. It must have been 10 pages long, and we bound it and colored the front. And she wrote on mine, 'I can't wait till your real novel comes out. Give me a call.' " He hasn't contacted Mrs. Poppy in years, but with "Max Tivoli" and the sweet fulfillment of Mrs. Poppy's faith in him, he says he's tempted to track her down.
E-mail Edward Guthmann at eguthmann@sfchronicle.com.
