‘TeaHere’s a place in Italy that needs someone. Why don’t you pay attention to that?” Inspired by his two-year stint directing the Writers’ Residency at the Santa Maddalena Foundation outside Florence, with these words American writer Andrew Sean Greer launches Coco, Baronessa Lisabetta, a helpless, clueless innocent into the embrace of the Tuscan hills and its eccentric aristocracy.
The narrator of Villa Coco, known as “our youth”, Gio and Giovedi, is here to fill the position of “assistant” to the Baroness. His duties include pruning roses, emptying drains, hunting the Baroness’s mortal enemy, the pine marten, and cataloging the contents of the dilapidated Villa Coco. He is convinced that priceless works of art, including those by Picasso and Botticelli, are hidden between the camel’s saddles and hat racks. He is joined by a staff consisting of a Sri Lankan cook, her husband and a Lebanese factotum; They take on the difficult task of keeping Villa Coco running and keeping the Baronessa out of harm’s way.
And the Baroness is not averse to trouble: even at 92 she is convinced that her best years are still ahead of her, while at the same time she feigns both deafness and blindness when it suits her. Along with his other duties, our young man must interact with Coco’s crew. There’s charming bohemian neighbor Estelle and Coco’s formidable whiskey-drinking friend Pippa, a Venetian princess. are relatives; There are dogs (the obnoxious pug Gorky, Pushkin and the adorable truffle hound Cesare – Greer is very good at animals); Lovers of lovers and suspicious acquaintances; And most of them seem positively determined to bring the house into disrepute.
Gio, who has taken a vow of celibacy to maintain focus, finds herself intrigued by sinister predatory Southern gentleman Furman Childress (“Ah was her friend’s lover”) and charmed by faded Genoese esthete Oscar, who gently offers romantic advice (“We’ve got to find you an Italian man”).
But this is the hardest part to handle, the sweetest button-up: Baronessa’s cousin Giacomo, tough but young, handsome but married, commissioned to accompany Gio on a mysterious errand, but it seems also recruited to seduce our straight and narrow young man. Because behind all these apparently chaotic and random introductions and excursions into the hinterland of Italy, it gradually becomes clear that the Baronessa has a precisely mapped course in mind, which may get our young man into more trouble than he is prepared for.
Greer, the Pulitzer-winning author of the 2017 comic novel Lace, states his aim clearly in his introduction: he wants to write what he calls a “charming novel”, by which he means a book that is as soothing as a hot bath, funny but nourishing, with “a glimmer of hope”. The time is certainly ripe for such an ambition. He offers a hostage to fortune by calling his style “entertainments” that rival those of Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene, while this book, though certainly attractive, is nothing like them. Greer’s young man is charmed by the Italians’ full admission of his ignorance of them, while Mitford knew his subject – the English upper class – inside and out.
His story is also very close to eccentricity with many nicknames – even the car is “Mitsu-bichi”. Greer has neither the deadly edge of Mitford, nor the wicked sophistication of Green, nor the skill of either in lifting material free from its roots in lived experience. Instead – and it is a credit to the sincerity of his emotional response – what Greer offers is a good look at the amazing beauty of Italy. He gives us the “golden-green waters” of the Po delta and valleys filled with white butterflies, while the description of the Grand Canal in fog is quite lovely: “a misty passage from which apparitions appear – stacks, rusted doors, lamp-posts, the carved head of some once drowned god”. Furthermore she is unashamedly sentimental, and though her other characters fade into her shadow, the Baroness, with her stories and her intrigues, her loyalty, wit and courage, and her love and admiration of our young man, casts the requisite magic – in the end, providing a spell threaded with hope.
