Andrew Sean Greer, <em>The Confessions of Max Tivoli</em>

This is the poem.

his is a passage from the second Book of The Confessions of Saint Augustine:

What was it...that pleased me in that act of theft? Which of my Lord's powers did I imitate in a perverse and wicked way? Since I had no real power to break his law, was it that I enjoyed at least the pretense of doing so, like a prisoner who creates for himself the illusion of liberty by doing something wrong, when he has no fear of punishment, under a feeble hallucination of power? Here was the slave who ran away from his master and chased a shadow instead! What an abomination! What a parody of life! What abysmal death! Could I enjoy doing wrong for no other reason than that it was wrong?...Can anyone unravel this twisted tangle of knots?

There is no passage of comparable power and insight in Andrew Sean Greer's new novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, though Greer's title deliberately evokes Augustine's--not to mention Rousseau's. (In a passage occurring late in the book, Greer's protagonist refers to himself in good Augustinian fashion as a "twisted...knot.") The Confessions--not Confession--of Max Tivoli has some virtues, including some nice details about historical San Francisco, but its primary emotional expressions are whining and self-pity: "I was home. Finally, home. And the sad, the hopelessly sweet and sad part of it was that, in knowing this, I would always be alone"; "Was there any luck like mine, anytime in history?" Weh ist mir.

Greer's novel is not unskillfully written. He understands that one of the ways of propelling us through a 267-page book is the careful withholding and then granting of information. To do this without frustrating the reader--to keep just a jump ahead of him but not much more--requires genuine craftsmanship, and this Greer has.

Saint Augustine is a particularly good point of departure because the Confessions is one of the defining moments of Western Culture. In it Augustine formulates and develops the idea of "subjectivity," the idea that the bundle of awareness, thought, feeling which constitutes consciousness is an "inner"--as opposed to an "outer"--life. Moreover, Augustine insists that this "inner" life is a narrative: it involves, like our "outer" life, the process of "growth." Such ideas have been challenged by philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, but there is no doubt of their impact on Western thought. "Dust and ashes though I am," writes Augustine, addressing God, "let me appeal to your pity, since it is to you in your mercy that I speak, not to a man...." In identifying ourselves with Augustine's "I," the "speaker" of his text, we tacitly agree that we are subjects too, that we too, like Augustine, have an "inner" life. And we agree, moreover, that our "individuality"--our sense of "who we are"--depends upon the workings of that "inner" life. The idea of "subjectivity" and the activity of reading are linked throughout the history of the West.

In modern novels, the "speaker" with whom we are to identify ourselves is often extremely "individual"--to the point of eccentricity, oddity, as is the case with The Confessions of Max Tivoli. This is also true of classic novels (the speaker of Twain's Huckleberry Finn is nothing if not odd) but, as "individuality" seems more and more under attack, novelists have responded accordingly. Identifying ourselves with excessively odd speakers like Max Tivoli is an assurance that, like them, we are individuals--though we may not be odd in the way they are.

Greer's book begins well, with a paragraph that promises a number of interesting plot twists:

We are each the love of someone's life.

I wanted to put that down in case I am discovered and unable to complete these pages, in case you become so disturbed by the facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get to tell you of great love and murder. I would not blame you. So many things stand in the way of anyone ever hearing my story. There is a dead body to explain. A woman three times loved. A friend betrayed. And a boy long sought for. So I will get to the end first and tell you we are each the love of someone's life.

The situation of the protagonist is interesting, too. Instead of growing older, as most people do, he grows younger. He begins life as an "inner" infant who has the appearance of a "outer" seventy-year-old man; as he "matures," he grows older mentally but younger physically. The way he looks and the way he "is" always add up to seventy--the Biblical three score and ten. If he looks fifty years old, he will actually be twenty; if he looks twenty, he will actually be fifty. Since he knows how old he was when he was born and knows the year of his birth (1871), he also knows exactly when he will die: 1941. It is an intriguing premise, and its Cartesian insistence on the distinction between "inner" and "outer" is done in an interesting, imaginative way. There are also various echoes of Nabokov's Lolita.

The problem is that some of the writing--particularly the writing about love--is really dreadful. (Two of my favorite lines are "We are not botanists, we men in love!" and "How is it mothers know these things?") Here are some longer samples:

She walked a little bit away from me, as if the memory of these old loves of ours, these antique statues, had to be left behind for us to continue. "People always say the greatest love story in the world is Romeo and Juliet. I don't know. At fourteen, at seventeen, I remember, it takes over your whole life." Alice was worked up now, her face flushed and alive, her hands cutting through the night-blooming air. "You think about nobody, nothing else, you don't eat or sleep, you just think about this...it's overwhelming. I know, I remember. But is it love? Like how you have cheap brandy when you're young and you think it's marvelous, just so elegant, and you don't know, you don't know anything...because, you've never tasted anything better. You're fourteen."

It was no time for lying. "I think it's love."

"You do?"

Of course I never grew tired. You see, I loved her.

"I worshiped her, Tim. She was like no one you will ever meet. Strong, independent. I never took her for granted for a moment, or pretended I understood her, and when she wanted to go I let her go, because she was art and she was music." He made another leaf, another, each turning precisely in the breeze that he imagined. "You won't understand. I can't express things. Look behind the door, there's a photograph."

Instead of illuminating what it feels like to be in love with someone, such prose is merely an obfuscation--and a rather genteel, sentimental, Victorian obfuscation at that. Worse: Greer is given to producing rather portentous bits of "wisdom." The opening sentence is one example: "We are each the love of someone's life." But the book is peppered with such dubious sayings: "It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love"; "Death makes children of us all; I learned this in the war." Of course, Greer may be simply attempting to imitate the style in which he imagines his protagonist would write, but we need something to assure us that the author himself doesn't take such pomposities seriously.

And there is worse. Towards the end of the book, Max Tivoli insists that he is not a victim of the "Oedipus complex":

If Harper ever finds these pages, I'm sure he'll show them to his psychoanalyst friend, and, oh, what a thrill for the old boy! I can hear his pencil chattering away. Let me imagine the notes: "Subject attempt intercourse with mother"--oh, not with my miniaturized equipment, Doctor, but I'm sure you mean something symbolic. Though is it exactly Oedipal if I married the mother before becoming the son? Is there some other myth with a better correlation. No, I am too twisted a knot. There is no untying me, Doctor. To release me, you must cut me in two.

Despite this denial, Greer's book is about the Oedipus complex; indeed, that is all that it is about, though the author has found a way to mask his subject so that the Oedipus complex appears at the conclusion as the great "revelation" of the book. The Confessions of Max Tivoli is about three people, two male and one female. The female (who is regularly referred to as a "mother" in the latter portions of the book) is attached to one of the males; the other male longs for her unceasingly-- "loves" her. Finally, the male who longs for the woman "murders" the other male. Doesn't that sound like the Oedipus complex? That the Oedipus complex appears here in part as parody (it is only as an "adult" that Max becomes an Oedipal "child") does not mean that it isn't fully present and the main determinant of the book. We go through 267 pages of prose and discover--the Oedipus complex. Suddenly the Victorian elements of the book begin to make perfect sense. Of course the book's prose style is Victorian: its sentiments are Victorian--and they are, moreover, unthinkingly Victorian. Because the Oedipus complex appears in the guise of an elaborate fiction, Greer does not have to examine it in any way. It is simply there--Truth revealed.

The problem is similar to that of a much better and stylistically more adventuresome book, Margaret Atwood's brilliant Oryx and Crake. In that book as well, the great "revelation" disappointingly turns out to be the Oedipus complex, as uncritically presented in Atwood as it is in The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Can't talented writers like Andrew Sean Greer and Margaret Atwood find something else to "reveal"? Mightn't they at least suggest the social determinants of Oedipal feelings? Not, I suspect, if they are to be published by houses like Ferrar, Straus and Giroux (Greer) and Doubleday (Atwood); not if they aspire to bestsellerhood. Such productions unfortunately do not involve the revelation inherent in great art--the complex sense that we are seeing something utterly true; rather, they are more like bourgeois comfort cookies: See, everybody suffers from the Oedipus complex. Alas.