Andrew Sean Greer's 'Villa Coco' and 'Effortless' Style - The Atlantic

Twice a year, every January and June, certain corners of the internet populate with photographs of extravagantly dressed men on the streets of Florence. These are the peacocks of Pitti Uomo, a Tuscan menswear trade show, flashing their plumage: fabrics in textures found nowhere in nature, jacket lapels large enough to verge on parody, ties knotted so elaborately that they would dazzle a longshoreman. Their displays are sometimes held up as examples of sprezzatura, a kind of nonchalant disregard for the rules of fashion. This belief underwrites the common myth that true style is effortless, a form of expression that arises from indifference rather than care.<br>And yet, more likely than not, any man attending Pitti Uomo has spent the past six months planning exactly what he was going to wear on any given day of the show—the belt that would hang too long, the patterns that would clash just so. The attendees are stylish, to be sure, but they also demonstrate that style is entirely compatible with effort—not so much an outpouring of the self as a result of the work that inevitably goes into producing that self.<br>I thought about this distinction often while reading Andrew Sean Greer’s witty and, yes, stylish new novel, Villa Coco, much of which takes place in the countryside surrounding Florence, a wilderness populated as much by eccentric expats as by rampaging wild boar and trundling porcupines. Greer, whose novel Less was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, here tells the story of a young man, our narrator, who travels to Italy in the early 1990s. He’s been hired by an elderly but vivacious baronessa to catalog the contents of her home for opaque reasons. The archivist arrives in Italy as stuffy as a nose in November, unflatteringly calling himself “a cable-knit sweater over a cable-knit heart,” in Greer’s characteristically evocative phrasing. As he gradually learns, properly becoming yourself in many cases begins with the emulation of others—those who know, for instance, when to leave their tie at home, or where to purchase red-velvet slippers that “make you feel like the pope,” or why one must never, ever place a hat on the bed.<br>Villa Coco: A Novel<br>By Greer, Andrew Sean

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A recent college graduate, Villa Coco’s narrator—whom the Baronessa insists on calling Giovedì, or “Thursday,” for the day of his arrival—spent the past few years entangled with boy after boy, and he lands in Italy committed to taking his work seriously, which entails a self-imposed vow of celibacy. Almost immediately, the 92-year-old Baronessa, less a human woman than a trickster god, scuttles his plans. In her chaotic mind, the worst thing one can be is “very comme il faut,” or as one should be. While plotting some mysterious caper in the background, she puts her man Thursday to work pruning her roses and hunting “our sworn enemy, the marten,” a weasel-like beast that slaughters her chickens. Worse still, she introduces him to Giacomo, her young cousin, a man caught in a marriage of convenience who bears a striking resemblance to the enticingly chiseled 17th-century sculptor Bernini.

Read: The man in the midnight-blue six-ply Italian-milled wool suit<br>Villa Coco is a romantic book, but one in which romance is auxiliary to friendship. Unfashionably, it is also not especially sexy. For Greer, sex is something that someone has, and perhaps has plenty of, but it is not something that anyone else has to hear much about. In any event, Giacomo isn’t as central to his plot as the others in the Baronessa’s orbit: her Lebanese groundskeeper, Ghazel, a defrocked monk whose enthusiastic malapropisms provide some of the book’s best comedy; Princess Maria Augusta, who insists that the American narrator doesn’t actually speak English; the beguiling artist Estelle, the Baronessa’s romantic rival turned confidant; and Oscar, an older gay man who is at once a source of great wisdom and another engine of sly mischief. In their company, the narrator begins “the slow transformation from an American into a man,” a process that is a matter more of learning to revel in misunderstanding than in discerning the right way to be.<br>That “slow transformation” is central to the book’s easygoing style. Villa Coco is all but frescoed with figurative language, and Greer’s seemingly effortless storytelling belies the careful craft of his metaphors and similes. Reading it, I recalled a passage from Michael Ondaatje’s novel Warlight, in which a character who imports greyhounds praises a woman by observing that “she’s got that greyhound line.” We understand immediately that he means she is elegant, maybe a little aloof, but we also recognize it as a comparison that emerges out of the importer’s life. For him, this phrase is not poetry but clay scraped from his shoes; for Ondaatje, it is an act of imaginative empathy. This is how figurative language should work in fiction: grounded in the...