Not to comment, but to illustrate.("The Confessions of Max Tivoli")(Book Review)

I recently saw a man wearing a t-shirt that said "I bring nothing to the table." These t-shirts should be handed out at the orientation session of every MFA program in the country. Not as a rebuke, but as celebration and encouragement. It is not always a new angle, or a new approach, or a new gimmick that your book needs. Don't add something just for the sake of adding. That's destructive. How about bringing nothing to the table? How about thinking inside the damn box every once in a while?

Andrew Sean Greer, when considering and plotting out his book The Confessions of Max Tivoli, clearly thought the family itself--all that malarkey that occupied Austen, Tolstoy, etc.--not quite meaty enough. (1) The family, well there's something to that, but what can one bring to the table? What if ... what if the protagonist was a frog? No, that'll never work. What if he ages backwards! Lighthulb above the head, agent on the telephone, the whole shebang.

It is possible that if this trick had been smoothly executed, if the character, having established himself as a backwards aging man, settled into a complicated and well-thought-out family/love story, it might be pretty fun, might even be welcome. But for Greer, the backwards-aging man is a crutch. It's his substitute.

The Confessions begins in the playground; Max Tivoli sits in a sandbox, an old man in a youngster's body. "There is a dead body to explain. A woman three times loved. A friend betrayed. And a boy long sought for." It is 1930.

"We all hate what we become." He writes, asking forgiveness for his childish handwriting. He is sixty, but he is losing his coordination. "I have seen women staring at themselves in restaurant mirrors.... I have seen men back from war." He feels the need to apologize to a young boy named Sammy. He looks the same age as Sammy, and has contrived to live and school with him.

Tivoli was born in 1871 in San Francisco. The doctor declared him "Rhinocerine," a word Tivoli is convinced was made up on the spot. He makes a friend in a young boy named Hughie, one of the few folks who know him for what he really is. He spends most of his time passing himself off according to his mother's advice: "Be what they think you are."

Much of the meat of the book comes from Tivoli trying to pass. Looking fifty-five, he is inside a boy of fifteen. Looking ten, he's a sour and spent sixty. There's an interesting moment when his appearance and his age coincide--at thirty-five he looks thirty-five.