Book lovers who lack the resources to visit the Italian countryside will find the next best thing in Villa Coco, Andrew Sean Greer's gambol amid the rolling hills and olive groves of Tuscany. Greer has become a virtuoso at crafting charmingly episodic novels, as he demonstrated with the Pulitzer-winning Less and its sequel, Less Is Lost. Now Greer, who has spent much of his adult life in Italy, takes readers through a country he knows well, as seen from the perspective of a recent college graduate who looks "so much more like a soulless marionette, an unenchanted Pinocchio, than a twenty-one-year-old American near the end of the millennium." This alleged milquetoast majored in Archives and Record Management and, at the suggestion of his adviser, responded to a job posting in Italy. His role is to catalog the belongings of the Baronessa Lisabetta, better known as Coco, a rich, 92-year-old widow.
Greer has created a delightfully eccentric tale filled with colorful characters and unusual developments. These include the protagonist's romance with Giacomo, Coco's married cousin, who "possibly works in publishing" and whose wife has a girlfriend; Pippa, Coco's princess friend, who once fell in love with a monkey; and his eventual discovery of the true reasons that Coco wanted an archivist. Hidden in the frivolity is one young man's realization of an eternal truth: that people aren't always what they seem, even--or perhaps especially--among the upper classes. To catalog the items in a villa is one thing. To classify the mysteries of the human heart requires a completely different inventory system, as Greer demonstrates in this seductive work. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer