The wisdom of his years

“The act of love,” says Bendrix in Graham Greene’s “The End of the Affair,” “has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace.” So it goes with the hero of Andrew Sean Greer’s “The Confessions of Max Tivoli,” for in this moody, brilliantly conceived story, peace, death and love are so closely linked that the presence of one inevitably carries with it the shadow of the others.

Max Tivoli, the hero in question, is born in turn-of-the-20th century San Francisco as an old man whose body grows younger rather than older with the passing years. “I am a rare thing,” he notes, and by “rare” he means to emphasize not the value of being different but the loneliness and isolation of being one of a kind. The entire novel is suffused with a sadness and melancholy that have the potential to devolve into an annoying self-pity. But in Greer’s elegant, luminous prose, Max’s sorrow never seems unjustified; the cruelties of his condition are made unexpectedly real and poignant -- resonant, somehow, with the sorrows of a more common existence. His parents, for instance, beset by worries about appearances, betray him by hiding his difference. “ ‘Be what they think you are,’ ” my mother whispered to me ... a tear at the corner of each eye. ‘Be what they think you are. Be what they think you are.’ ” His younger sister begs him, “ ‘We can’t tell anyone, don’t tell, please ... don’t tell.’ ”

The greatest betrayal in the book is not committed by a person, however, but by time itself, which thwarts Max’s repeated attempts over the course of 50 years to woo the love of his life, a neighbor named Alice Levy. When they meet, Alice is 14 and Max is a 17-year-old in the body of middle-aged man. One can imagine the potential for comedy and tragedy in such a situation, and Greer gently invokes both in a scene of great delicacy, in which Max, having pined after Alice for months, finally admits his secret to her: “ ‘I have to tell you. Listen to me. You don’t have to talk. Just listen.... I’m not ... what you think I am, it’s not what I am. I know what I look like.... I’m seventeen. Do you see? Alice. I’m just a boy.’ ”

The comic aspect of these words comes from the fact that they are literally true, and perfectly suited to a love-struck teenager. The tragic aspect is that they are being spoken by a frumpy, bearded man in his 50s. Tragedy, unfortunately, wins out; Max is rebuked and Alice’s mother whisks Alice out of his life, leaving him behind to suffer and brood, attempting to lose his sorrow in work and drink.

But the same curse of time that thwarts Max in his pursuit of love also affords him another chance at it when, years later, he runs into Alice again on the streets of San Francisco. Alice doesn’t recognize him, for by now he looks like a young man. He changes his name for her, prevents her from meeting his family and keeps the secret of his infirmity quiet. By dint of all these contrivances, he manages at last to win her over, and their marriage is, for a time, blissfully happy. “It is a wolfish world, but she relieved it,” he says. “Alice made a rich and lovely life.”

Like all the happy moments in this book, though, Max’s marital bliss is shadowed by the threat of discovery and the knowledge that, whatever peace he has been able to purchase for himself by hiding, it must eventually end. His attentive cataloging of the mundane facts of his life with Alice has a quality of loving compulsiveness about it, as if he is stockpiling memories against imminent siege. “What my wife and I ate for breakfast: Weetabix from the box. What we learned together, laughing in the privacy of our parlor, but never performed: the turkey trot. What she smelled of in the evening when she stepped smiling into the parlor where I waited: Rediviva.” In the end, the inevitable parting is not due to Max’s complications with time but to Alice and her own mysterious sorrow. One of the most moving and bittersweet twists in this novel is that characters not afflicted with Max’s problem still fare no better in love or life than Max. “We all hate what we become,” Max says at the beginning. “Mine is a very different story, but it all turns out the same.”

That sounds slightly grim, but for all its heartbreak and reversals and sad, world-weary wisdom, “The Confessions of Max Tivoli” is not, ultimately, a nihilistic book. Greer’s descriptions sometimes have a tendency toward the overblown and overly sentimental, but their guilelessness hints at Max’s true romance, of which his love for Alice really forms just a part. The novel delights in details about old San Francisco: the new Golden Gate Park; the detonation of Blossom Rock; the bars and brothels of the Barbary Coast; Woodward’s Gardens amusement park, now defunct, with its silver balloon and performing bear -- as well as descriptions of period furniture and dress and hats and automobiles. In fact, everything Max encounters is subjected to the same intense attention and described for us in such lucid and reverent terms that, despite the constant sorrow and heartbreak that run the length of the story, it is impossible not to suspect the truth revealed to us eventually on the penultimate page.

“Life is short, and full of sorrows,” writes Max, “and I loved it. Who can say why?”