Twice a year, every January and June, certain corners of the internet are filled with pictures of scantily clad men on the streets of Florence. These are the peacocks of Pitti Uomo, the Tuscan menswear trade show, resplendent in their feathers: textured fabrics nowhere to be found in the original, jacket belts oversized enough to almost mimic, buttons so artfully tied that they would appeal to a beachcomber. Their shows are sometimes set as examples of sprezzatura, a kind of reckless disregard for the rules of fashion. This belief reinforces the common myth that true style is simple, a form of expression born of indifference rather than care.
And yet, more than likely, any man attending Pitti Uomo has spent the last six months planning exactly what he would wear on any given day of the show—a belt that would be too long, patterns that would just clash. The attendees are stylish, to be sure, but they also show that style goes hand in hand with effort—not so much dedication as the result of the work that undoubtedly goes into crafting that individuality.
I thought about this difference many times while reading Andrew Sean Greerit’s clever and, yes, a brilliant new novel, Villa Cocomuch of which takes place in the countryside surrounding Florence, a wasteland populated by aliens such as wild boars and roaming porcupines. Greer, whose novel Below 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 is hired by an old but brilliant stupidity listing the contents of his home for no apparent reason. The archivist arrives in Italy with a stuffy nose in November, calling himself “a cable-knit sweater over a cable-knit heart,” in Greer’s evocative parlance. As he learns step by step, making himself good in many situations begins with the imitation of others—those who know, for example, when to leave their ties at home, or where to buy red velvet slippers that “make you feel like a shark,” or why one should never put a hat on the bed.
A recent college graduate, Villa Cocothe narrator—whom the Baroness insists on calling Giovedì, or “Thursday,” for the day of her arrival—has spent the last few years with boy after boy, and lands in Italy committed to taking her job seriously, which involves a self-imposed vow of celibacy. Almost immediately, the 92-year-old Baroness, who is less a human woman than a trickster god, interrupts his plans. In his confused mind, the worst a person can be is “comme il faut,” or like one. must to be While plotting in the background, she sets her man Thursday to work pruning her roses and hunting down “our sworn enemy, the marten,” a weasel-like animal that butchers her chickens. Worse, he introduces her to Giacomo, her young cousin, a man trapped in a marriage of convenience who bears a striking resemblance to the 17th-century sculptor Bernini.
Villa Coco it is a book of love, but in which love is the assistant of friendship. Unfashionably, also not particularly sexy. For Greer, sex is something that a person has, and maybe has a lot of, but not something that the other person has to hear a lot about. In any case, Giacomo is not as central to the plot as the others in the Baroness’s orbit: her Lebanese protector, Ghazel, an abdicated nun whose passionate antics provide some of the book’s best comedy; Princess Maria Augusta, who insists that the American narrator does not speak English; con artist Estelle, the Baroness’s romantic rival turned confidante; and Oscar, an old gay man who is at once a source of great wisdom and another engine of subtle destruction. In their group, the narrator begins “a slow transition from American to man,” a process that is more a matter of learning to enjoy misunderstandings than of realizing the right way to be.
That “slow change” is the basis of the book’s simple style. Villa Coco it is drawn in figurative language, and Greer’s seemingly simple storytelling belies the careful craft of its metaphors and metaphors. Reading it, I remembered a passage from Michael Ondaatje’s novel Warlightwhere the character who orders the greyhound praises the woman for seeing that she “has that greyhound streak.” We immediately understand that he means that he is elegant, maybe a little far, but we also recognize it as a comparison that emerges from the life of the importer. For him, this saying is not poetry but the soil removed from his shoes; for Ondaatje, it is an act of thoughtful compassion. This is how figurative language should work in fiction: rooted in the real world of those who use it—and not, as in lots of AI-generated prosejust a hanging filigree affixed to a marble statue.
Greer understands this well, although he uses it to a different effect than Ondaatje does. As we learn in the opening pages of the book, Villa Cocothe narrator is much older than he was at the time of the events of the story he narrates, and he frequently struggles to empathize with his younger self. At times, especially in moments of heightened emotion, he speaks in terms he would have understood as a teenager. Of her first meeting with the British-accented Oscar, for example, the narrator says, “He spoke like the voice of the London Tube, and it immediately put me at ease,” recalling a childhood trip abroad. The comparison takes him back to his stable, organized past—a life as predetermined as a train traveling from station to station.
Her friendship with Oscar and others will change all that, opening Giovedì to an uncertain and even more interesting future, one where she will have to piece together the broken pieces from the glorious chaos of the Baroness’s house. Greer shows this evolution in part by having her older narrator embark on adventures her younger self has yet to experience. When he explains, for example, that the light illuminates Estelle’s hair “briefly from within like a Venetian chandelier,” he is speaking from the point of view of someone who has actually walked through the city’s canals and palazzi, which our protagonist has yet to explore. Likewise, his description of Oscar smiling “like a man when he is given a special wine” comes long before he learns how special wine can be.
This is the language of a person trying to look back on the American who was from the perspective of the person who will be. His self-expression reveals a world he has found nowhere to be found in his suburban upbringing—which he sometimes calls “Spielbergian,” to the surprise of the Baroness.” The narrator’s style, in other words, is a kind of introduction: the later result of a long, difficult project to become the kind of adult who can turn the Florentine photographer’s head.” What seems like carefree sophistication—perhaps even sprezzatura—is the real evidence of the hard work ahead.
Without giving too much away: the narrator eventually learns that the Baroness and her crew are not quite what they claim to be. Yet somehow, this revelation does not tarnish their panache, their balance, or even their glory. What is most honest about them is how busy and cheerful they show themselves to the world, a fashion that proves not where they came from but what they made for themselves. Acknowledging that the good life contains fool’s gold takes nothing away from the beauty of pyrite.
This is a quintessentially good book for bad times, the kind of novel in which a car breaks down and it turns out to be what should have happened. As Greer suggests, real charm is something you have to try on like you might try on a dead man’s suit, until what feels fake is yours. It often begins in a hoax and grows into a funny story—sometimes passing, quickly, through heartbreak along the way. In that regard, relentlessly charming Villa Coco is its proof of concept.
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