The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
by Andrew Sean Greer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Andrew Sean GreerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-02-01
ISBN: 0312423810
Number of pages: 288
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
Book Review: "I would be old until I was young, no sooner."
Summary: 4 Stars
Max Tivoli is the bedeviled son of two loving parents whose funicular life delivers him into extremely bizarre consequences which would threaten most to insanity or nervous breakdown - neither of which conquers the protagonist.
Funicular life is the description given because Max's body diminishes as physical years increase. All in denominations of 70. His physical body added to his actual years of life amount to 70. When he is 17, Max looks 53; when Max is 62, he looks 8 - and so forth.
All of Max's bizarre life occurs between 1871 and 1941. And, during those years of puritanical purity and refined prudish behavior, Max must be silent about the truth. He must tell no one about himself - what his parents told him was the "Code."
During his heretical life of imprisoned reversal - Max has two common friends: Alice Levy and Huey. Huey, who has figured out what is going on, stays true to keeping the secret hidden from others for a lifetime. Alice, who comes in and out of Max's life, breaks his heart on several occasions, only to later bequest upon Max the greatest gift: a son named Sammy.
Under the guidelines of the Code mixed with the unbelievability of the truth - only Huey seems able to grasp the fractured fiction of Max's life - Max cannot even try to tell the truth. On three occasions in the book Max breaks the Code, and all three events are disasters. So, in order to avoid a fourth, with a 58-year old man's mind and 12-year old's penmanship, he commences to write his memoir (what the author describes to be a confession), for his son Sammy, so that the Code's quantum of disturbing uniquity can be absorbed slowly, methodically, and deliberately.
Great concepts arise throughout this book. Max's pining for a daughter, as teenage youth exists within, but a mother of that girl pines for Max, as he appears to be a man of years. Walking about streets with his mother, but posing as her brother because of the similarity of age in appearance. Later in life, physically being the same age as his son, Max sits with wife and son, appearing more like a meeting with mother and brother. Basically, the book has Max having old women flirt with him when he is young and young women flirt with him when he is old.
In the middle of the book, when his body and age truly align, he says a line which should have been the epitaph on his tombstone: I would be old until I was young, no sooner.
In today's world, the pertinence of this book seems incredibly applicable. A news story discusses how an 8-year boy shoots his father and father's friend while hunting. Think how this could be a deliberate act of murder if the child was like Max - who never told anyone about his Code? And, next month cinema will bring out Fitzgerald's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Coyote Canyon Press Classics) This concept of inverse proportionality, along with young author Greer's reputation, has already been in vogue, but could soon erupt.
But this is really not new. Fitzgerald found an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler's "Note-books." "The Sword and the Stone" has Merlin age backward. Greek mythology touched this topic; "Star Trek" had one such episode - eternal youth as well; and don't forget "Mork & Mindy" where pudgy hysterically obtuse middle-aged Jonathan Winters cooed like a baby. None are identical, each is extremely similar.
This young author has been compared to Proust. Because of the time period involved in this novel, and the author's intense degree to detail and awkward love, I found the writing style similar to Steven Millhauser ("Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer"). The writing of spectacular life's memoir to a son or an unknown reader is like "Memoir From Antproof Case" by Mark Helprin. Any such comparison is a great honor to any writer, and an honor deserving to this author indeed.
Summary of The Confessions of Max Tivoli: A Novel
"We are each the love of someone's life." So begins The Confessions of Max Tivoli,
a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other.
Born with the physical appearance of an elderly man, Max grows older mentally like any child, but his body appears to age backwards, growing younger every year. And yet, his physical curse proves to be a blessing, allowing him to try to win the heart of the same woman three times as at each successive encounter she fails to recognize him, taking him for a stranger, so giving Max another chance at love.
Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, questioning the very nature of love, time, and what it means to be human.
a heartbreaking love story with a narrator like no other.
Born with the physical appearance of an elderly man, Max grows older mentally like any child, but his body appears to age backwards, growing younger every year. And yet, his physical curse proves to be a blessing, allowing him to try to win the heart of the same woman three times as at each successive encounter she fails to recognize him, taking him for a stranger, so giving Max another chance at love.
Set against the historical backdrop of San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, questioning the very nature of love, time, and what it means to be human.
Out of the womb in 1871, Max Tivoli looked to all the world like a tiny 70-year-old man. But inside the aged body was an infant. Victim of a rare disease, Max grows physically younger as his mind matures. In Andrew Sean Greer's finely crafted novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, Max narrates his life story from the vantage point of his late fifties, though his body is that of a 12-year-old boy. He has known since a young age that he is destined to die at 70, and he wears a golden "1941" as a constant reminder of the year he will finally perish in an infant form. His mother, a Carolina belle concerned over her son's troubling appearance, curses Max with "The Rule": "Be what they think you are." Max fails to keep this Rule only a handful of times in his life, but it is the burden of living by it that wounds him and slowly alienates him from the people he loves.
Over Max's narration of the preceding decades of his life, he offers outsider's snapshots of San Francisco and all of America across the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout, Greer uses the literary device of reverse aging to interrogate the evolution of social conventions, the finitude of a human life, and the decay of memory. Max wants love. But his curse destines him to deception. He loses his wife, Alice, changes his name, and remains hidden from his own son to keep his true identity secret. Only his lifelong friend, Hughie, stands by Max and can see the person inside the anachronistic body. Like the best science fiction and myth, the novel uses its central conceit to reveal human prejudice and explode all assumptions of normalcy to profound effect.
Love is a destructive force in The Confessions of Max Tivoli. But Greer recognizes that in the failure of love is also hope. He artfully captures Max's fragile world with a delicacy that never crosses into sentimentality but also avoids the monumental scale of tragedy. As Max says near the end of the novel, "It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing to waste ones life for love." A journey with Max, while brave and beautiful, is hardly a waste. --Patrick O'Kelley
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