An essay on The Confessions of Max Tivoli

I found this essay I wrote a few years ago on a great book about love and death, The Confessions of Max Tivoli. Why not post it here?

In The Confessions of Max Tivoli, what seems like a gimmick takes on the air of great sympathy and understanding. Its protagonist, born with a foreknowledge of his death by simple addition, is born an old man aging backwards. We view him meeting his best friend with the face of a 54-year-old, falling in love with a girl his age while secretly sleeping with her mother (he does, after all, appear to be even older than she), getting the girl when they both coincide at the right age, and then, finally, pretending to be the same age as her son some decade and a half after she leaves him. Beyond requiring the most suspended of suspended disbelief, this concept seems hokey and awkward at fist glance – ages backwards? What are we supposed to learn, that age is a state of mind? Is this a Robin Williams starring vehicle in disguise?

There is simply nothing to prepare you for the actual text in the novel, which, both directly and indirectly, seems a modern incarnation of Lolita, another novel whose startlingly beautiful language takes a sticky concept and turns it into the ultimate meditation on love and life. I do not mean to say Andrew Sean Greer has the talent of Vladimir Nabokov (although, who’s to say, this is only his second novel). There is not a hint of preciousness in the design, not a second of cozying into the subject, not a single person who rises above his/her circumstances to learn an important lesson on the universality of humanity. No, that responsibility is ours, and the lyricism of the backwards man-boy does teach us invaluable truths about love, about self, about time, and about the inevitability of aging – as it is here, careening like a car crash you are powerless to control, the process that takes Max back in time propels us and confronts us with the inevitability, the uncontrollably finite process of time and age.

Max, being (mostly) the only person aware of his predicament is certainly a character locked into a sense of insular logic – being the only person having to live in his body, with his choices, it becomes a certain inevitability he’ll jettison the “life” of Max Tivoli on each reappearance of Alice, the girl he remarks towards the end of the novel he’s not sure if he ever really knew. Mid novel, he “becomes” his father, Asger Van Dalen (rechristened Tivoli after his love for the Danish amusement park) and marries his Alice under the pseudonym. Later, he becomes Hughie Dempsey, Jr., the child of his lifelong best friend, the only person who’s known and accepted Max for all of his often questionable choices.

Tivoli is about love, in the, at this point, unsurprising notion that anyone will do anything for love. This plot device, the lifelong obsession with Alice, is effective in its way – as a dramatic device to both mark the life and the motivation of Max, it doesn’t disappoint. But in the sense that she never knows the true identity of Max, even when she does (she thinks he’s a kindly old uncle living upstairs that was her mother’s true love), there’s an inescapability that the two cannot really be together. As a married couple, he lavishes her and loves her and is, we suspect, a reasonably good husband, but we know, as they marry when Max is 35 and looking like a 35 year old, they have only a set amount of time before he just wanders too far backwards from the man she married and their relationship becomes untenable.

To an extent, this can be read as a metaphor for love in general – the couple is given less than a decade of happiness before the moment she says to him, “I don’t know who you are.” It’s true she doesn’t, his identity is a lie, but the love is as strong as ever. Much like Lolita, the protagonist gets his woman for a time, but in truth never really has her, her affections somewhere else, and her need for Asger never coming close to resemble the intensity of feeling Max has for her.

It’s hard to tell when the book first sideswipes you and has you in its clutches. Perhaps it’s at the end of its first section, upon the realization that Sammy, the 12-year-old a now-58-year-old Max shares a room with, is actually his son. What it does is make the story, for perhaps the first time, full of possibility. You were willing to write off a character who either seems like he’ll be Simon Birch (that is, chirpy and sentimental) or else the Elephant Man (and invoke “you poor thing!” syndrome). The son gives you the sense that this man may have had a full life, entering and backing away from real interaction with the world, conquering his affliction occasionally, falling victim to its implications in others.

In that sense, what becomes the most sympathetic aspect of Max is, in its eloquent precision, his isolation. This isolation may be justified – he can’t exactly proclaim his condition to the world. Still, as a 17-year-old awkward in his skin, it barely matters that that skin is a 53-year-old’s – we all understand the sense of feeling a foreigner in your own body, skeptical of the way people view you and the way you view yourself.

Which is to say Andrew Sean Greer, a lyricist if ever there was one, follows precisely the axiom of great writing: take the specific, make it universal. Certainly the story of a Max, in love with an Alice, the type of woman who’d never pay attention to a Max (in this case because she thinks he’s in his mid fifties), is as old as time in its way. Yet you’ve never felt on the inside of it like this – the threads of time are pulled back and forth, his life in the sandbox, puttering around Alice’s house as a 12-year-old, and its backward-life forward chronology have a certain braided style that makes the puzzle of the novel interesting on simple logistics – his son, eh? How’d he find out where he lives without tipping off the mother? And the mother’s Alice, eh? How did she get convinced to take in such a stray 12-year-old?

The answers to these questions are great answers, of course, as any good novel must be fully aware of the appeal of their smallest tidbits. The final fourth of the novel, a section of careening intensity is so full of themes and elements you barely knew had overwhelmed your every sense – Max’s lifelong friendship with Hughie, the absence of his mother, the castrating effect of time on his body (as a 12-year-old, he notices, resigned, he just can’t get the thing to work like it used to), the accidental discovery of Alice’s whereabouts, Max’s hypnotic conversation with her newest ex-husband, the end of Hughie, and a final, sweet resolution of the whole crew – a late night cry and kiss goodnight from a torn up Alice.

What makes reading and absorbing these details such an overwhelming and moving experience, I think, is that concept that seemed cumbersome and untenable in the extreme to begin with, the obstinately backwards movement of time in a culture confined to a linear existence. Rarely in a novel – in absence of a terminal disease (and I’m happy for every time one is absent in a novel) – are we so swiftly reminded of the mortality of our protagonist. Even at 12, we know his years are even more finite than that because this trajectory of time, even more than an age-related dementia, will literally turn Max into a baby. In their magnificent final moments together, Hughie begs for a solitary existence with Max, saying he alone understands Max’s fear of dying as a helpless baby, and he alone is his answer to it. We know he’s right – Max, we’re certain, has no possible way of telling Alice or Sammy of his condition, and it’s a moment that clues us into the mental singularity of a man forced to live his life in total isolation from the world.

Was Hughie simply acting out a lifelong crush on Max? That reading is possible, I’m afraid, and in those final sections of the last quarter of the book, you’re thrust into an unenviable position as a writer – that is, the position to dismiss Hughie’s mostly human behaviors as long overdue puppy love. I choose not to read it this way, although I admit that such a non-reading is an arbitrary choice. Hughie, a homosexual in the beginning of the 20^th century, and Max are equal foreigners in their bodies and their worlds, and Max draws this parallel frequently. I read Hughie’s love for Max comes from a bond of understanding, of being the only two people alive that, without judgment, accept each other as they are. Indeed, Hughie’s secret is as antisocial as Max’s – unmoved by the death of his son and in a marriage that’s more annoyance than matrimony, Hughie is simply a man trying to find any way to make it through his days. With Max to look out for, he has someone to feel superior to (he does, after all, have it easier), and thus, accepted by.

I searched for reviews of The Confessions of Max Tivoli after I completed the book, and, dazed from the emotional wallop of its final quarter, and overwhelmed by its parallels to Lolita (more in a moment), I was surprised to hear the analysis, “beautifully written, but without anything meaningful to say on love and life.” I couldn’t disagree more. It may be not so noteworthy to say that love is all there is to live for, and that it is eternal – so, maybe there isn’t that much left to say on love – but as for life, I think Tivoli is actually a fairly important document. In its fictional post script – one saying the book has been brought to you, after being found in an attic in 1947, by the “Samuel Harper Foundation,” tells you, quietly, the fate of its reading. Sammy, then in his early 20’s, found this book and later started a foundation that trafficked manuscripts of some kind.

What it means is that the experience of good writing on your existence is a profound communicator – Max, who could not approach the things that mattered to him during life did find them after his death, either by a theoretical understanding of whatever Alice makes of these journal entries or, if Max is correct in his final pages, by having his 1941 necklace returned to her. He also lives on by the work of his son, perhaps even inspiring and causing the work of his song. It means that Sammy was so profoundly moved by what he read, he worked his life to publish it. This simple sentence after the completion of the events of the novel says that marking your existence on this planet, you make your mark by being true and creating proof of your existence. In another echo of Lolita, we’re told of what the power of writing will allow you to forgive. Max is a far less treacherous human being than Humbert Humbert, but he felt no less isolated, and, in truth, he’s not very much less eloquent.

Why Lolita, you ask? Like Lolita, Max gets the girl for a while, only to have her taken away by something he should’ve seen just under his nose. Like Lolita, he meets her briefly before one or both of the main characters’ deaths. Like Lolita, the “transcripts” we’re given are posthumous of the main character, and the fates of the other remaining characters told by an ominous outside source. Like Lolita, the character’s first sexual encounter is told in poetic non-specifics. Like Lolita, you forgive unforgiveable acts because you love the voice of the person speaking them.

It’s amazing that a novel with a ludicrous concept could leave such an indelible impression about the nature of people, the truths of existence, and the importance of expressing them. It’s amazing that it could still do this in the best way a novel can, by sideswiping you with utterly absorbing characters in a fully spellbinding narrative flow. The Confessions of Max Tivoli as a title is a sort of everyman journal entry type of banality, and that, in truth, could be the case – this is simply a man we’re presented with, with elements of his mortality and purpose apotheosized to the order of highest importance. In essence, they remind us why those elements are of the highest importance to us.