The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel

Imagine being born an old man and growing physically younger. Imagine grappling with physical and chronological ages that are at odds with each other for all but a brief period in your middle age. Imagine falling in love and stopping at nothing to be near the one you love. Max Tivoli has had such a life. He is a protagonist like no other, and now he writes his confessions. No, not his memoirs... his confessions.

Max bares his soul, revealing the paradoxes, the ironies, and the cyclical patterns in his unique and tumultuous life. He documents his struggles against the currents of time, where he has had to keep reinventing himself as time moved inexorably forward for others. He laments the deceit and rejection he has had to practice to follow his mothers advice to "be what they think you are." He describes how his best friend, in stages, plays the role of his son, his brother, and his father. He memorializes a love that transcends drastically changing age differences.

Taking place in San Francisco around the turn of the twentieth century, when gaslights and carriages make way for electric lights and automobiles, the action centers on the three time periods in Max's life when his path crosses that of his love, Alice. In each of the three sections he reluctantly reveals, bit by bit, the surprising details that comprise the core of his life. His need for acceptance and love is portrayed in an entirely new and fresh way. The story evinces emotions that are powerfully heartrending. The writing is lyrical and full of imagery. This incredible novel will take your breath away, and I recommend it highly. If you only have the time to read one literary novel this season, make it this one.

Eileen Rieback

About halfway through the book, I found myself thinking that the writing style and some elements of the plot reminded me of another book. When I looked at the other reviews on the jacket, I realized that it was Nabakov's Lolita.

The same hopeless thrill of a doomed love runs through this book. Max Tivoli knows from the start of his life as an old man that his is a curse he cannot overcome - much as he might try. His relationships with Alice, first as a father figure who is unable to control his desire for her young girl self, then as a jealous husband who rapes his wife on the eve of her desertion of him, and last as her adopted son who yearns to kiss her and sleep with her, fill one with pity and despair.

One of the greatest tragedies is that Max, and hence the reader, ends the book still not knowing exactly how Alice feels about the various incarnations of Max she has known. Did she learn to hate him as a girl, care for him as a husband, love him as a son? Obviously his feelings for her are always stronger than hers for him - but what are her feelings? So much of the book is devoted to Alice - but the reader is frustrated along with Max - just grasping at images of Alice instead of the whole person.

The writing is lyrical at times and the premise is very intriguing, but I found myself drifting a bit as I read. As fascinating as Max should be - he took a backseat when his lifelong friend Hughie was in the scene. Max's life is unreal, to be sure, but I found his character a bit unreal as well - and found myself gravitating toward the more sympathetic Hughie.

I enjoyed this book - maybe not as much as I'd hoped - but would recommend it without reservation. I am not sure, however, if it leaves me wanting to rush out and buy more of Greer's works.

Andrew Sean Greer's fantastical allegory recalls, variously, Woolf's "Orlando," Wilde's "Dorian Gray," Kafka's "Metamorphosis," and even Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love." In addition to such high-minded precedents, however, the novel is not above stooping to the unabashed romanticism of the 1980 film "Somewhere in Time" (whose shameless mawkishness is, I'll admit, one my life's unjustifiable guilty pleasures). "The Confessions of Max Tivoli" is an odd blend of cynicism and sentimentality--but, somehow, it mostly works.

Greer's time-bending plot dishes up a unique twist: Max Tivoli is born with a 70-year-old body and an infant's mind, and ages to a 70-year-old with an infant's body. This conceit allows the author to imagine Max having three distinct chances at winning the love of his life--first as a father figure, then as a husband, and finally as a son--since Alice (his love) doesn't recognize him as being the same person each time. The novel does Sophocles one better, though Max himself wonders "is it exactly Oedipal if I married the mother before becoming the son? Is there some other myth with a better correlation?"

Greer's love of storytelling and enviable cleverness mask the occasional outbreak of sentences you'd more expect to find in a bodice ripper: "With fingers spread beneath her scented hair, touching the landscape of her scalp like something beneath the sea." "Wide, oh, still lovely face, and yes, of course it was you. My little paper girl, crumpled in a pocket for half a century, unfolded now before me. . ."

What keeps such purple prose in check is the inescapable gloom of Max's impending demise. For Max, perception is reality, and he spends his life being not who he is, but the person others think he should be. And, unlike what you'll find in a dimestore romance novel, Max is a monster not only physically but also emotionally: his pursuit of happiness is so utterly selfish that he neglects to attend to the few people who love him in return.

A final aside: readers who enjoy the phantasmagoric, historical, and literary elements of Greer's novel might also get a kick out of the wit and epic scope of Marc Estrin's "Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa."

Max Tivoli's father proudly declares him a "gnome" at his birth, and throughout the course of his backwards life Max will constantly question his "monstrous" blood. Indeed, his unique disability forces upon him choice after choice in which he must wound others if he is to experience any happiness of his own. It both ruins his relationship with Alice, his obsession and the love of his life, and offers him the bittersweet opportunity for another chance with her when she no longer recognizes the man who youthens, rather than ages. Max's relationships with Alice divide the book into thirds: first, he is her elderly-seeming landlord, then for a few short years he is her contemporary, and finally, as the book is told in flashback, Max returns to his old love in the guise of a child.

There's something depressing about a book in which you simply cannot bring yourself to love any of the main characters. With a single exception, the characters in "Max Tivoli" are selfish and self-centered, occasionally cruel and often insensitive, and delving into pathetic every time they reach for sympathy.

The exception is Hughie, who befriends Max when he is a child of six and looks like an old man, and stays with him his entire life until he is an old man in the body of a child. Hughie is almost the only person outside Max's family to know the truth, and his steadfast loyalty and unquestioning friendship were more heartwarming than anything else in this book. Forget the love story between Max and Alice - the truest love here is between Max and Hughie.

The first part of the book is richly steeped in the atmosphere of late nineteenth century San Francisco. It's full of lush detail and is firmly rooted in a sense of time and place; critical when you're dealing with a story such as this one, where time is of such vital importance. And yet, by the second third of the book, we start to drift apart from the setting, losing the essence of the era just as Max himself is starting to recognize what time is going to mean for him. Was this deliberate? Maybe. I can see the author transitioning, allowing Max's own life to become the yardstick by which we measure the passage of time, rather than the events of the outside world. But if so, it's a decision I don't agree with.

That's a minor quibble, though, and a question of style. And even the most unlikable characters are beautifully drawn, complex and all too human. Max's unusual lifespan is the frame upon which the story is built, and it's an original and interesting one, supporting the book without overwhelming it. I could go on and on about the parts that bugged me, but when I set the book down, my overall impression was Wow, that was a great book. In the end, that's all that matters.

Andrew Sean Greer told a National Public Radio interviewer that he conceived the premise for this book while listening to Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages," where Dylan croons, "Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." That sounds more grandiose than saying he got the idea from Mork & Mindy, the old sitcom, which based Jonathan Winters' character on exactly the same premise as Max Tivoli: a child born in an old man's body, growing younger as he ages. Diverging from Winters' earlier, funnier rendition, Greer styles this novel a romance, albeit a weirdly creepy one. Our protagonist meets Alice, the object of his affection, when they are teenagers but he appears old and decrepit. He can't have her then, of course, but his Mearth-like condition allows him to revisit her two more times during his backwards lifetime and go unrecognized.

Each time Max reencounters someone, the circumstances of the reunion are styled as bombshell plot twists, unleashed in the very last lines of each of the book's major parts with all the cheap dramatic resonance that such last lines impart; you can practically visualize the movie screen going black for three pregnant seconds while the audience is invited to register its gasps. The problem is that most readers will already have worked out for themselves the general plot lines well in advance of their revelatory moments -- pretty much by the first chapter, in fact -- so it's almost embarrassing when one begins to sense Greer's narrative working itself into a lather while endeavoring to flabbergast us. If only one could fake the gasp so he'd wrap it up sooner.

The other serious problem with the writing is that the romance lacks any credibility, conveyed to the reader in constant and flagrant violation of the elementary "show, don't tell" rule beloved of amateur writing instructors. We are shown nothing to substantiate Max's unusually fierce devotion to this girl Alice, just told on each and every page how smitten and in love with her he is as though that alone could suffice to manipulate readers into empathizing with his plight. It doesn't, and the plot squanders many opportunities to use Max's bizarre condition as a vehicle for exploring more universal themes of heartache and estrangement. Again and again, just when Greer seems on the cusp of something insightful, he finds himself mired in the premise's absurdity. It is, of course, absurd, but it would have been possible to get past that by making the characters and their relationships vivid and endearing (as Audrey Niffenegger brilliantly accomplished in The Time Traveler's Wife), or even by throwing in a few scenes of comic relief to diffuse that fundamental ridiculousness. Instead, the book remained completely humorless and contrived even in its unceasing despair, so I put it down not very shy of its back pages. But I'm sure the last line was a killer.