Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer is a buoyant, gently subversive comedy that delights in the theater of the absurd while quietly probing the tender seams of human connection. Written in Greer’s characteristically playful prose—at once nimble, ironic, and observant—the novel offers readers a sun-dappled escape into an Italy that feels both sensuous and faintly surreal.
At its center is a young gay American who arrives expecting to serve as archivist to a formidable ninety-two-year-old baroness, imagining himself amid the dignified cataloguing of aristocratic treasures. Instead, he finds himself enlisted in a far more eccentric enterprise: a kind of living archive of chaos. His duties range from dispatching a troublesome marten to repairing septic tanks, all while navigating a revolving cast of idiosyncratic guests whose emotional dramas and peculiarities threaten to eclipse any notion of orderly record-keeping. What he ultimately catalogs is not wealth, but the unpredictable messiness of human lives.
Greer’s language is a particular pleasure here—lightly mischievous, laced with dry wit, and attentive to the comic rhythms of social interaction. Scenes unfold with a theatrical immediacy, heightened by the novel’s lack of traditional chapters, which creates the sensation of inhabiting an ongoing stream of days rather than a structured narrative progression. This stylistic choice reinforces the novel’s central preoccupation with the continuous, sometimes exhausting flow of experience itself.
For many readers, this accumulation of absurd situations will prove enchanting: a series of comic tableaux stitched together by the luminous backdrop of Italy’s landscapes, meals, and cultural textures. Greer evokes place with sensory richness—the warmth of shared tables, the languor of sunlit afternoons, the musicality of local speech—drawing the reader fully into the novel’s world.
Yet the very qualities that animate the book may also, for some, induce fatigue. The relentless parade of eccentricities and episodic misadventures can begin to feel repetitive, diluting the narrative momentum. What initially sparkles with whimsical unpredictability occasionally settles into a rhythm that risks overstaying its welcome.
Still, beneath the farce lies a quieter emotional core. Greer uses comedy as a veil through which themes of vulnerability, belonging, friendship, and the fragility of love gradually emerge. The protagonist’s journey becomes less about professional purpose and more about the delicate process of learning to accept intimacy, imperfection, and the inevitability of disorder in both relationships and life itself.
Ultimately, Villa Coco is a novel that revels in its own charm—an effervescent, gently philosophical meditation disguised as a comic romp. Readers seeking a lighthearted yet thoughtful escape will likely find themselves delighted by its playful spirit, even if its whimsical excess occasionally tests their patience.
Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC in return for an honest review