Some novels ask you to root for a plot. Villa Coco asks you to fall in love with a house, a handful of eccentrics rattling around inside it, and the particular flavor of chaos that only late-summer Tuscany can produce. Andrew Sean Greer, the Pulitzer Prize winner behind Less, returns with a book that is lighter on its feet than its premise suggests and considerably deeper than its sunny cover implies.
The setup is deceptively simple. An aimless young American, nicknamed Giovedi by the household, arrives at a crumbling Tuscan villa in the late 1990s to work as an archivist for Coco, the villa’s ninety-two-year-old baronessa. His job title promises quiet afternoons cataloguing art and correspondence. His actual days involve evicting a marten from the walls, tracking down a broken septic line, fielding a parade of houseguests who treat the villa like a stage, and, most improbably, helping the imperious, endlessly alive Coco chase down the one great love she let slip away decades earlier before time runs out for both of them. What begins as an odd-jobs comedy slowly reveals itself as something closer to a reckoning with mortality, memory, and the debts we owe the people who shape us.
Greer’s real gift here is tonal control. He can pivot from a slapstick set piece involving a funeral urn to a quietly devastating aside about grief without the seams showing, and that elasticity is what keeps Villa Coco from tipping into either farce or sentimentality. Coco herself is the novel’s engine: vain, generous, manipulative, and magnetic in roughly equal measure, the kind of character who makes you understand why an entire household would reorganize its life around her whims. The Tuscan setting, too, is rendered with an eye for specific, unglamorous detail — plumbing, weather, the boredom between dinner parties — that makes the villa feel lived-in rather than postcard-pretty. Greer’s prose retains the wit and precision that made Less such a favorite, but it’s aimed here at bigger, more wistful targets: what we owe our elders, what youth is actually for, and how love can survive being deferred for a lifetime.
Early critical response has been warm, with reviewers gravitating toward the same word: generous. Several have noted that the book works simultaneously as a breezy summer caper and as a more searching meditation on aging and second chances, a combination that’s genuinely hard to pull off without one mode undercutting the other. Commentary has also pointed to the fragmented, memory-driven structure — scenes arriving out of strict chronological order, mysteries about Coco’s past surfacing gradually — as a deliberate choice that mirrors how the narrator himself is piecing together a life he doesn’t yet understand. A few have wished for slightly more urgency in the middle stretch, where the episodic, one-crisis-at-a-time rhythm can feel meandering before the emotional payoff arrives.
That meandering is, ultimately, part of the point. Villa Coco isn’t built for readers wanting propulsion; it’s built for readers willing to linger in a crumbling house with an impossible, wonderful old woman and let her teach them something about time. By the time its quietly moving resolution arrives, the novel has earned its warmth honestly. This is Greer at his most generous — funny, humane, and unafraid of sentiment that’s actually been worked for. A lovely, sun-warmed read for anyone who believes a summer novel can still break your heart a little.
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