The Confessions of Max Tivoli

By Andrew Sean Greer

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2004), $23

If you can buy The Confessions of Max Tivoli's central thesis -- that the eponymous narrator was born resembling an old man and each year grows younger -- you'll probably find Andrew Sean Greer's novel compellingly heartbreaking. But I didn't. To his credit, Greer doesn't attempt to explain Max's medical condition beyond having the character's father call him a Nisse, a mythical Danish monster. But Max's predicament is so intertwined with the story -- and so, to my way of thinking, stupid -- that it wrecks an otherwise good read.

Don't get me wrong: I have no problem with fantastic twists. Horror, sci-fi, and other genres are built on the implausible, and I often enjoy them. But something about the way Greer puts across his premise makes it seem contrived instead of imaginative. I wasn't convinced, so Max's dilemmas didn't grab me. Even when Greer focused on the pain of unrequited love (a theme I generally warm to), and even when I could see that his prose was lyrical and unusually gorgeous, I still wasn't moved.

To be fair, the book's plot is pleasantly eccentric. Born into a family that urges him to hide his condition, Max uses a variety of tricks to appear his correct age. He also nurses a great sorrow: his inability to connect with childhood sweetheart Alice due to his cockeyed aging process. At first, in a Lolita-like quirk, he marries Alice's mother to be close to his jailbait love; later Max marries Alice herself, and then, when he has devolved into a boy's body, becomes her adopted son. It's got all the earmarks of a wrenching read, but Confessions' leitmotif transforms the sorrowful into the ludicrous. Now that's a tragedy.