Reading Group Guide
Our Book Club Recommendation
Andrew Sean Greer's The Confessions of Max Tivoli is at once an audacious literary trick -- the account of a life lived backward in time -- and an earnestly realistic tale of growing up, falling in love, and growing old in America in the first part of the 20th century. The novel is buoyed by an expansive sense of both humor and tragedy that recalls the novels of John Irving, Reading groups will find that Greer's singularly charming narrator and protagonist provides a wonderful subject for conversation in himself -- and he is matched by the author's delicately rendered portrait of a country just coming into the age of its modern power.
Around the fantastical premise is woven a story of young love lost, then regained, then lost and regained again. Born as an old man in 1870s San Francisco, Max appears as a kind of fairy changeling child -- his parents keep his true age secret from the world and pretend that he is an elderly relative. His father leaves home, an early instance of the pattern of painful abandonments that Max will endure. His solace, at the age of 17, is his love for Alice, the teenage daughter of a neighbor -- but she, of course, thinks that the bearded Max is a middle-aged man.
Max tells the stories of his own travails with both sadness and humor but also with an abundant delight in the world of early-20th-century San Francisco -- there is a feeling of innocence about the country, not yet shadowed by the Second World War or the Bomb. Book clubs will enjoy discussing Greer's lively rendering of this optimistic age. They will also take pleasure in ferreting out the correspondences that the author artfully sets up between his tale and the works of writers such as Proust, Nabokov, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Max's impossible life is appropriately matched by his determined and obsessive love for Alice -- and it seems fitting when, years later, he encounters a 30-ish Alice at a time when his own age and appearance match hers. He marries her under an assumed name, all the while hiding his secret. When she discovers it -- or refuses to see it as other than a delusion -- Max's brief idyll of contentment is shattered. Alice disappears, and Max, now aging into a parody of boyhood, is left brokenhearted.
Throughout this story of Max's desperate love and the deception it entails, Greer offers up a poignant meditation on secrecy and devotion -- on the ways in which our need for love forces us to conceal those things we believe might make us unlovable. This is not only Max's dilemma; his boyhood friend Hughie, the only one who knows the truth about his backward life, carries a similar secret and a similarly long cherished love. While Max is often blind to the cost of Hughie's devotion to him, reading groups will be more attuned to what Max cannot, until the end, see. The Confessions of Max Tivoli becomes, ultimately, far more than a successful literary experiment -- it takes on brilliant life as tale of fate, friendship, and the maddening, beautiful persistence of the heart. Bill Tipper
An Introduction from the Publisher
An utterly original love story, The Confessions of Max Tivoli incorporates an intriguing plot twist that is by turns fascinating and horrific. The beguiling protagonist, Max Tivoli, is born with the appearance of a man of seventy. As his body grows younger, Max ages intellectually and emotionally -- granting him a painful and alienating existence that allows him one pleasure (or curse): to fall in love with the same woman, Alice Levy, over and over again. But she is not the only recurring figure in his world. His childhood friend, Hughie Dempsey, appears in Max's life at its most intense turning points. Hughie always knows Max's true age and identity, though it takes years before Max realizes that his best friend is also the greatest love of Alice's life.
Set against the vibrant backdrop of turn-of-the-century San Francisco, The Confessions of Max Tivoli challenges our assumptions about the nature of love, of time, and of the difference between appearance and reality. Daring and imaginative, it's a novel that is sure to spark lively conversation. We hope that the following questions will enhance your reading group's lines of inquiry.
Topics for Discussion
1. What did the novel's epigraph and opening sentence mean to you when you began the book, and what do they mean to you now? Are they romantic notions, statements on the hopelessness of love, or perhaps something in between?
2. When you began this book, did you consider growing younger to be only positive? Do you believe that now? Looking at Max's life, what are some of the advantages of true old age?
3. In his focus on Alice, has Max missed the one person who truly loved him his whole life -- Hughie? Is it ever easy to recognize such devoted people in our lives?
4. What is society's basis for determining whether a lover is an appropriate age? In what ways does Max's condition actually help illuminate his true character?
5. Max loves Alice as a daughter, as a wife, and as a mother. How does this echo the various roles a lover plays in our lives? Which of Max's roles is he best suited to? Do we always take on recurring roles when it comes to love?
6. Are Max's fears of infancy -- the inability to walk independently, care for himself, and articulate his needs -- very different from the traditional fears of growing old?
7. Greer frequently allows his narrator to address the reader directly, occasionally in a cheeky tone. How much of the plot surprised you, in spite of the intimate, candid aura created by Max?
8. Max's memory of his first kiss with Alice is nothing like her recollections of that same event. What do you make of the varying perceptions offered in the novel? Is Max a trustworthy narrator?
9. Max's first role in Alice's life is as her "Shabbos goy." Does Max later continue to be the "houseboy of her heart" in some way, an aid in her life?
10. Is Max's reverse aging the only thing standing in the way of his happiness? How much of his outcome is affected by his personality, fate, and other factors?
11. Max's condition gives him unusual opportunities -- for instance, having access to his son's life that few fathers have ever had. Does it deepen or erase his role as a parent? Though they both appear to be boys, is there still a generation gap between Max and his son?
12. The word confession carries connotations of wrongdoing or scandal on the part of the speaker. To what is Max Tivoli confessing in his "memoir"? Is first-person narration crucial to this plot?
13. Greer embeds countless historical details in the novel, such as the use of collars for mailing notes after the earthquake and the seated poses struck by women accustomed to wearing bustles. What does the novel teach us about the quirks of daily life a century ago?
14. Alice is not a typical Victorian woman. She is hotheaded and freethinking; what do you think of her as a match for Max? Is she merely self-centered and flaky, or do you agree with Victor Ramsey's theory that she changed her life through the only means available to women during that time period: marriage? What is Alice's ultimate reason for leaving Max?
15. Max struggles to make his outward appearance both socially acceptable and less at odds with his psyche. Describe what your external appearance would look like if it were a picture-perfect representation of your psyche.
16. How did you feel when you read of Hughie's death? Why do you think he killed himself? Did the modern idea of a "gay man" exist back then? Given that at the time even openly gay Oscar Wilde had a wife and children (as Hughie did), what options did gay men and women have for happiness or love?
17. What would you have done with a life like Max's? Is he an idealist, an artist in a world not made for him, or a brute who squandered a potentially happy life? What are the sources of a truly happy life? In what ways have you "grown younger" in your own life?
About the Author
Andrew Sean Greer is the author of the story collection How It Was for Me (Picador) and most recently a novel, The Path of Minor Planets (Picador). His work has appeared in Esquire, Ploughshares, and Story. He lives in San Francisco, California.