Relative Strangers.(The Confessions of Max Tivoli, The Story of a Marriage)(Book review)

Andrew Sean Greer's 2004 novel, "The Confessions of Max Tivoli," quite brilliantly fulfilled the difficult task it set itself--to show the life of a man born old, who over the decades grows backward into infancy and, finally, nonexistence. This narrative feat had been attempted before, by Scott Fitzgerald and Gabriel Brownstein, but never at such length or with such loving ingenuity. At every turn of Max Tivoli's wrong-way life, his predicaments and discoveries light up the human condition as the odd thing it is and, in addition, give us vivid glimpses of San Francisco's colorful past as it evolves toward the present. The novel is magical; but such a success holds for the ...