The Work That Goes Into ‘Effortless’ Style
· The Atlantic
Twice a year, every January and June, certain corners of the internet populate with photographs of extravagantly dressed men on the streets of Florence. These are the peacocks of Pitti Uomo, a Tuscan menswear trade show, flashing their plumage: fabrics in textures found nowhere in nature, jacket lapels large enough to verge on parody, ties knotted so elaborately that they would dazzle a longshoreman. Their displays are sometimes held up as examples of sprezzatura, a kind of nonchalant disregard for the rules of fashion. This belief underwrites the common myth that true style is effortless, a form of expression that arises from indifference rather than care.
And yet, more likely than not, any man attending Pitti Uomo has spent the past six months planning exactly what he was going to wear on any given day of the show—the belt that would hang too long, the patterns that would clash just so. The attendees are stylish, to be sure, but they also demonstrate that style is entirely compatible with effort—not so much an outpouring of the self as a result of the work that inevitably goes into producing that self.
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I thought about this distinction often while reading Andrew Sean Greer’s witty and, yes, stylish new novel, Villa Coco, much of which takes place in the countryside surrounding Florence, a wilderness populated as much by eccentric expats as by rampaging wild boar and trundling porcupines. Greer, whose novel Less was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, here tells the story of a young man, our narrator, who travels to Italy in the early 1990s. He’s been hired by an elderly but vivacious baronessa to catalog the contents of her home for opaque reasons. The archivist arrives in Italy as stuffy as a nose in November, unflatteringly calling himself “a cable-knit sweater over a cable-knit heart,” in Greer’s characteristically evocative phrasing. As he gradually learns, properly becoming yourself in many cases begins with the emulation of others—those who know, for instance, when to leave their tie at home, or where to purchase red-velvet slippers that “make you feel like the pope,” or why one must never, ever place a hat on the bed.
A recent college graduate, Villa Coco’s narrator—whom the Baronessa insists on calling Giovedì, or “Thursday,” for the day of his arrival—spent the past few years entangled with boy after boy, and he lands in Italy committed to taking his work seriously, which entails a self-imposed vow of celibacy. Almost immediately, the 92-year-old Baronessa, less a human woman than a trickster god, scuttles his plans. In her chaotic mind, the worst thing one can be is “very comme il faut,” or as one should be. While plotting some mysterious caper in the background, she puts her man Thursday to work pruning her roses and hunting “our sworn enemy, the marten,” a weasel-like beast that slaughters her chickens. Worse still, she introduces him to Giacomo, her young cousin, a man caught in a marriage of convenience who bears a striking resemblance to the enticingly chiseled 17th-century sculptor Bernini.
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Villa Coco is a romantic book, but one in which romance is auxiliary to friendship. Unfashionably, it is also not especially sexy. For Greer, sex is something that someone has, and perhaps has plenty of, but it is not something that anyone else has to hear much about. In any event, Giacomo isn’t as central to his plot as the others in the Baronessa’s orbit: her Lebanese groundskeeper, Ghazel, a defrocked monk whose enthusiastic malapropisms provide some of the book’s best comedy; Princess Maria Augusta, who insists that the American narrator doesn’t actually speak English; the beguiling artist Estelle, the Baronessa’s romantic rival turned confidant; and Oscar, an older gay man who is at once a source of great wisdom and another engine of sly mischief. In their company, the narrator begins “the slow transformation from an American into a man,” a process that is a matter more of learning to revel in misunderstanding than in discerning the right way to be.
That “slow transformation” is central to the book’s easygoing style. Villa Coco is all but frescoed with figurative language, and Greer’s seemingly effortless storytelling belies the careful craft of his metaphors and similes. Reading it, I recalled a passage from Michael Ondaatje’s novel Warlight, in which a character who imports greyhounds praises a woman by observing that “she’s got that greyhound line.” We understand immediately that he means she is elegant, maybe a little aloof, but we also recognize it as a comparison that emerges out of the importer’s life. For him, this phrase is not poetry but clay scraped from his shoes; for Ondaatje, it is an act of imaginative empathy. This is how figurative language should work in fiction: grounded in the material worlds of those who employ it—and not, as in so much AI-produced prose, mere gilt filigree glued to a marble statue.
Greer understands this well, though he employs it to different effect than Ondaatje does. As we learn in the book’s opening pages, Villa Coco’s narrator is much older than he was during the events of the story he is telling, and he occasionally struggles to sympathize with his younger self. At times, especially in moments of heightened feeling, he speaks in terms that he would have understood as a young man. Of his first meeting with the British-accented Oscar, for example, the narrator notes, “He talked like the voice of the London Tube, and it instantly put me at ease,” alluding to his one childhood trip abroad. The comparison calls him back to his stable, structured past—a life as smoothly predetermined as a train gliding from station to station.
His friendship with Oscar and the others will change all of that, opening Giovedì up to a more erratic and flamboyant future, one he will have to cobble together with pieces purloined from the glorious disarray of the Baronessa’s home. Greer signals this evolution in part by having his older narrator evoke experiences his younger self hasn’t yet had. When he explains, for example, that the light illuminates Estelle’s hair “briefly from within like a Venetian chandelier,” he is speaking from the perspective of a man who has actually traversed that city’s canals and palazzi, which our callow protagonist has yet to explore. Likewise, his description of Oscar smiling “as one does when one is offered a special wine” arrives long before he has learned how special a wine can be.
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This is the language of someone trying to look back on the American he was from the perspective of the man he will become. Its very showiness dramatizes an acquired worldliness found nowhere in his suburban upbringing—which he at one point calls “Spielbergian,” to the Baronessa’s bafflement. The narrator’s style is, in other words, a kind of foreshadowing: an eventual product of the long, complicated project of becoming the sort of adult who can turn a Florentine photographer’s head. What looks like careless sophistication—perhaps even sprezzatura—is really evidence of the hard work that goes into coming-of-age.
Without giving away too much: The narrator eventually learns that the Baronessa and her colorful crew aren’t entirely what they claim to be. Yet somehow, this revelation doesn’t tarnish their panache, their eccentricity, or even their nobility. What is most honest about them is the labored yet lively way they present themselves to the world, a style that attests not to where they came from but to what they’ve made of themselves. Admitting that the good life is veined with fool’s gold takes nothing away from the luminous beauty of pyrite.
This is a fundamentally pleasant book for unpleasant times, the kind of novel in which a car breaks down and that turns out to be exactly what should have happened. As Greer ultimately suggests, true charm is something you have to try on as you might a dead man’s suit, until what feels counterfeit becomes truly your own. It often begins in fraud and grows into a funny story—sometimes passing, fleetingly, through sorrow on the way. In that regard, the relentlessly charming Villa Coco is its own proof of concept.