Kept in isolation by his grandmother until the age of six, he is taken out after her death by his parents to a park where he meets Hughie. The same age chronologically, Hughie never falters in his affection for Max and later resorts to suicide rather than live without him.
The axis upon which the narrative turns is Max’s love for Alice. They first meet when she is 14 and he 17: he falls in love with her and attempts to dissuade her from loving Hughie, but with Max’s outer appearance of a fifty-three-year-old man, she is repulsed by his advances. Such is the overwhelming intensity of Max’s adoration of Alice that he renders her image in exquisite portraiture and pens a novel-length eulogy.
The scenario of a man’s secret desire for a girl – later a woman – whom he can never entirely possess does, of course, bring to mind Lolita. Greer’s work is indeed resonant of Nabokov, but his protagonist lacks the proprietorial craving for the creature with whom he so longs to be with. This can partly be attributed to his perception of himself as a monster: a creature dependent upon deceit if he is to achieve any sort of integration into the world he lives in.
Twenty years later they meet again by chance: she does not recognise him and he does not reveal his true identity, but unable to abate his obsession with her, determines to make her love and marry him. Their marriage lasts several years during which time they have a son. Alice appears not to notice Max growing ever younger, and it is not until she leaves him that he attempts to tell her the truth, which she refuses to believe. They do not meet again until he is 12 and apparently orphaned. Ignorant of his identity she adopts him and he becomes son to his wife and brother to his son.
The novel is set in turn of the century San Francisco, presented in subtle and careful detail so that it does not appear especially dated or firmly encamped in the genre of historical fiction. So engaging is Max and the characters who surround him that the placing of the novel does, in fact, feel almost incidental.
Though there is grandeur in his gestures toward both Alice and Hughie, they are rendered in prose as ethereal and delicate as his life. Greer portrays the pathos and compassion of an individual in the rawest state of vulnerability. Max’s heart explodes onto the page without recourse for a moment to anything other than the most brutal dissection of human emotion.
The Confessions Of Max Tivoli is a frequently alarming and invasive exploration of Max’s unending torment, and of those around him. Entwined in Max’s narrative is his mother’s lifelong incomprehension of his father’s disappearance; Hughie’s marriage in an attempt to quell his homosexuality and love for Max; and Alice’s love for Hughie that she has concealed since her teens.
“We are all the love of someone’s life,” begins the novel: it is a mesmerising account of lives ravaged by love and longing, written with literary flourish and subtle wit.
06 June 2004