If you’re looking for a work of fiction that’s charming from start to finish, Villa Coco is the book for you. It’s seductively entertaining from the get-go, with a luscious opening line: “The little Tuscan train station, brown shutters against yellow paint, seemed so fanciful you might unwrap it and find it was chocolate.” Indeed, Andrew Sean Greer’s seventh novel feels itself like a proverbial box of chocolates—a treasure chest of surprises waiting to be sampled. Readers of Greer’s previous novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Less and its follow-up, Less Is Lost, will not be disappointed.
The narrator recalls his “poor, gay, bookish” days as an American college graduate of archives and record management, heading to Tuscany to help a woman catalog her estate as his first job. After some chaotic collegiate romances, he has sworn off men for a while, hoping to find balance through “the bloodless precision of the archivist’s life.”
Not surprisingly, Villa Coco provides just the opposite. His employer, 92-year-old Baronessa Lisabetta (“Coco”), has entertained Mick Jagger, dated Salvador Dali and hung out with Allen Ginsberg. She promptly dubs her new employee “Giovedi” (Thursday in Italian, like a girl Friday), and demands that he learn three things: to dress for dinner, speak Italian and enrich himself in history and culture. She also mysteriously announces, “I have put something in motion from which there will soon be no returning.”
Meanwhile, Giovedi does everything but archive as he drives around in Coco’s “Mitsu-bitchy.” What starts as an amusingly chaotic account of his erratic slate of duties (trying to trap a marten, making olive oil, watching detective shows with Coco) slowly coalesces into a tightly wound plot full of life lessons and devilish surprises. Helping Giovedi along the way are two of Coco’s longtime friends, artist Estelle and Oscar, a gay man who advises Giovedi to “find a warm dictionary” for his Italian efforts but to “not be lazy in love.” Soon Giovedi finds himself trying to navigate a relationship with Coco’s young, handsome, married cousin, Giacomo.
Coco has much to teach her charge, especially that “All that is certain is we won’t be back. Not at this place, this moment. Not ever.” Readers will relish the many grand, goofy, adventures found in Villa Coco, as well as the delights of the Italian countryside and cuisine. Oscar’s description of his cherished friend perfectly sums up this enchantingly comic, poignant novel: “But you have to think of her as a magic door. Every time you open it, it leads somewhere new.” Greer’s novel is a Tuscan romp that overflows with sunshine and surprises while providing a deep meditation on growing up, growing old and navigating the many crossroads in between.