Backward look propels writer’s career forward

On a fall day in 2000, Andrew Greer was standing by his refrigerator, making lunch and humming a Bob Dylan lyric: “I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.”

The budding novelist started thinking. Could he write something like that, a story about a man who ages in reverse?

“I began to remember other characters like this in literature -- Merlin, some Greek myths -- and the idea appealed to me,” Greer recalls. “It seemed related to some of my main interests in writing: the passage of time, the nature of human love, the nature of human friendship.”

The result is “The Confessions of Max Tivoli” (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), which was recently published to glowing reviews.

But it was only after Greer finished his manuscript set in 19th century San Francisco about a man who is born old and grows younger that he decided to troll Google with the phrase “aging backwards.” Up popped F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” -- a 1922 short story that Greer had never read.

“That was news to me,” says the tall, lanky, slightly tousled author. “It made me panic at first. But then it was a relief. I didn’t have to have the burden of coming up with a new idea.”

Since then, friends and acquaintances have pointed out other antecedents, such as Jonathan Winters’ turn on “Mork and Mindy.”

Yet what smitten critics have been hailing most is not the wild premise of the book but Greer’s vision of the mundane poignancy inherent in the human condition: to love and to lose what one loves.

“History is not the point of the book,” says Greer. “Aging backward isn’t the point of the book. I mostly wanted to write about the passing of time and the complicated situation of being in love. That’s always what I write about.”

Love, to say the least, is complicated in Greer’s second novel. The intensely moving story is narrated by Max Tivoli in 1930, looking back on his life, which began in San Francisco in 1871. He is born bald and wrinkled and shrunken and while he grows progressively younger on the outside, passing from old man to middle age to youth, he matures normally on the inside. Max, naturally, feels like a freak so his parents devise one rule for him to follow: “Be what they think you are.”

When Max is a 17-year-old, he pretends to be the bearded old man he resembles, which becomes that much harder to do when he falls crazy in love with a 14-year-old girl named Alice. Three times in his life Max encounters Alice; each time he is someone completely different to her, completely unrecognizable. To him, she is always the same. In the novel, as in life, the past thrums ever in the present.

“As much as I tried to search the details of her face in the gaslight of the evening,” Max observes after Alice leaves a room, “I lost her more and more. The past had its back already turned; there was no speaking with it.”

You almost could call it a heartbreaking work of staggering normality.

“Enchanting, in the perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment brought to grandeur by Proust and Nabokov,” John Updike wrote in the New Yorker of “Max Tivoli.” “... Greer presents life as essentially a solitude, an ever renewed exile from the present, a shifting set of gorgeous mirages that nothing but descriptive genius can hold fast.”

“Quietly dazzling.... Max may be a monster, but he is a profoundly human one, a creature whose unusual disorder, far from making him a freak to be wondered at, simply magnifies his normal and recognizable emotions, sharpening their poignancy,” added the New York Times Book Review.

In the living room of his Victorian flat in San Francisco’s Lower Haight district, Greer mulls over the central question of his novel like Marcel with his madeleine. “Would we be any happier,” Greer asks, “if we got younger or is it living that makes us old?”

At 33, Greer doesn’t have the decades of pent-up frustration that Max has weighing on his heart but the author knows a little about struggle and elusive gratification.

“Unhappy stories,” he says, “are more interesting than happy ones.”

He grew up in Rockville, Md., the son of two chemists who were voracious readers. (He has an identical twin brother, Michael, who lives in Brooklyn and writes fiction as well.) He wrote his first novel at 16. “Just terrible,” he calls it.

While at Brown University he wrote another one. Also terrible, he says, although that didn’t stop him from trying to peddle it to publishers. He then spent a couple of years in New York, working odd jobs, struggling for a foothold in the publishing industry -- fact checker, agent’s assistant -- with no luck. Contemplating literary suicide, he instead enrolled in the writing program at the University of Montana, where he wrote yet another novel. He couldn’t give it away.

“It was devastating,” Greer recalls. “I’ve written a bunch of books. Why can’t I sell them? None of them were good enough to sell. I was too young. I couldn’t do what I was trying to do.”

Finally, in 2000, Greer published his first book, a short story collection, “How It Was for Me.” The next year came “The Path of Minor Planets,” a novel examining the lives of a group of astronomers at six-year intervals over a quarter of a century -- brought together by their professional interest in a returning comet and their personal gravitational pull.

Both books received good reviews but sold only modestly. In the meantime, Greer had moved to San Francisco and was living with a man he had fallen in love with in Montana, David, a software trainer. He continued to work odd jobs: testing video games, naming toys (“What do you call a radio that floats in a pool?”).

And every morning he wrote three pages, sometimes meeting his quota in an hour, other times laboring into the night. The result was “The Confessions of Max Tivoli.”

“I was convinced no one would read this book,” Greer says, “so I wrote whatever I wanted to write.”

Originally, Greer was planning to set the book in the present, although when he started to work back through the decades of his protagonist’s life he realized he wasn’t that interested in describing the recent past.

“I really didn’t want to write about San Francisco in the ‘60s or ‘70s,” he says. “All the really cool stuff was happening in the 1880s. So, I just took a deep breath and did a Victorian novel. It wasn’t planned. But the idea of the 19th century seemed the perfect setting to make Max’s condition believable, and to give me license to create an elaborate, sorrowful voice of longing.”

Greer spent four months haunting the manuscript reading rooms at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library and the San Francisco Public Library, paging through diaries and newspapers from the era to soak up the period details.

“I wanted to find stuff that was surprising, lost stuff,” Greer says.

There was, for instance, the trend of women sporting live beetles on their dresses.

But when Greer found himself with a 400-page manuscript stuffed with historical color he decided that he had to pare the book down to the heart of the matter. So he sliced out 100 pages.

“I thought I was going to write a 600-page book about a guy who lives backward and witnesses the history of California,” he says. “I didn’t write that book. I got rid of most of my research.”

Max, for example, sleeps through the 1906 earthquake.

“It was so much fun to write,” Greer enthuses. “I loved the voice of Max. It was modeled after Nabokov. It makes reference to ‘Lolita’ all the time. It’s really Victorian. I could keep it up but I don’t want to make a career out of it.”

Greer is working on a new novel, although he won’t say much about it other than that it takes place in San Francisco in the 1950s.

“I find it hard to write contemporary fiction,” he says. “Then I feel it needs to be hip and contemporary and I’m too old for that. I was never comfortable with that style to begin with.”

Recently, Greer gave a reading at a San Francisco bookstore and was surprised to find scores of people waiting for him. A couple of years ago when he showed up at a reading, no one else did. He wound up going out into the street to invite people into the store.

“I’m not used to people I don’t know coming to my readings, let alone people who’ve read the book,” he says. “Now I don’t have to go out onto the street anymore.”