It wasn't so long ago that I was enthusing about Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage. I liked it so much that I sent off at once for this, his first novel. Once it arrived, though, I felt a bit hesitant to throw myself into it. The story of a man who ages backwards? How strange it sounded. But, like the best magic realism, which category I think this must fall into, once you accept the premise, the whole story becomes completely believable and extremely moving. Yes, Max is born with a "rare condition" -- his physical age is the exact reverse of his mental/real-time age. That is, he is born looking like a man of seventy, and as time passes the years gradually fall away. He knows, therefore, the exact year of his death -- 1941 -- which his parents have engraved on a locket so that he will never forget it, though by this time, of course, he will be physically a tiny, helpless baby. This fact must, of course, remain a terrible secret, something which Max's parents impress on him from an early age -- "Be what they think you are" is the Rule his mother imposes on him. How hard this is may be easily imagined. As a child, Max has no friends, until one day a chance meeting in a park brings him into contact with Hughie, a boy of his own age, who sees beyond the strange old man's body to the boy's mind behind it, and becomes Max's lifelong friend, one of the few people who know his secret. But it is when Max reaches adolescence that things become really difficult and painful. Aged 17, with the appearance of a man in his fifties, he falls in love with beautiful Alice Levy, who of course sees him as nothing but an aged neighbour. Worse, Alice's widowed mother develops a passion for him and he is drawn into an intensely sexual affair, all the time longing to be with the daughter rather than the mother. Things go badly wrong, and Alice disappears from his life, only to reappear again when Max has reached thirty-five -- the only time in his life when his real age and his body's age actually coincide. This time he succeeds in winning Alice, and they marry, though at once Max comes under strain, as he is unable to tell his secret to Alice and has to conceal from her the fact that he is getting younger all the time. The marriage eventually ends -- badly -- but Max is reunited with Alice towards the very end of his life, in circumstances both bizarre and painful though also bringing him much joy of a rather equivocal kind.
Set in the San Francisco of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the novel takes a tremendous historical sweep through the period, encompassing among other events the San Francisco earthquake and the First World War, and beautifully detailed in its depiction of the clothes, the houses, the neighbourhoods, the whorehouses. All that is great -- but what is really great is how beautifully this novel is written, how deeply it delves into the human mind, how much it has to say about love and about friendship. I believe Andrew Sean Greer is a really important writer and I'm excited to see what he does next.
