Introduction

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A beautiful and daring feat of the imagination, "The Confessions of Max Tivoli" reveals the world through the eyes of "monster," a being who confounds the very certainties by which people live and in doing so embodies in extremis what it means to be human.

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Excerpt

I

APRIL 25, 1930

We are each the love of someone's life.

I wanted to put that down in case I am discovered and unable to complete these pages, in case you become so disturbed by the facts of my confession that you throw it into the fire before I get to tell you of great love and murder. I would not blame you. So many things stand in the way of anyone ever hearing my story. There is a dead body to explain. A woman three times loved. A friend betrayed. And a boy long sought for. So I will get to the end first and tell you we are each the love of someone's life.

I sit here on a lovely April day. It keeps changing all around me; the sun alternates between throwing deep shadows behind the children and trees and then sweeping them back up again the moment a cloud crosses the sky. The grass fills with gold, then falls to nothing. The whole school yard is being inked with sun and blotted, glowing and reaching a point of great beauty, and I am breathless to be in the audience. No one else notices. The little girls sit in a circle, dresses crackling with starch and conspiracy, and the boys are on the baseball field or in the trees, hanging upside down. Above, an airplane astounds me with its roar and school-marm line of chalk. An airplane; it's not the sky I once knew.

And I sit in a sandbox, a man of almost sixty. The chill air has made the sand a bit too tough for the smaller kids to dig; besides, the field's changing sunlight is too tempting, so everyone else is out there charging at shadows, and I'm left to myself.

We begin with apologies:

For the soft notebook pages you hold in your hands, a sad reliquary for my story and apt to rip, but the best I could steal. For stealing, both the notebooks and the beautiful lever-fed pen I'm writing with, which I have admired for so many months on my teacher's desk and simply had to take. For the sand stuck between the pages, something I could not avoid. There are more serious sins, of course, a lost family, a betrayal, and all the lies that have brought me to this sandbox, but I ask you to forgive me one last thing: my childish handwriting.

We all hate what we become. I'm not the only one; I have seen women staring at themselves in restaurant mirrors while their husbands are away, women under their own spell as they see someone they do not recognize. I have seen men back from war, squinting at themselves in shopwindows as they feel their skull beneath their skin. They thought they would shed the worst of youth and gain the best of age, but time drifted over them, sand-burying their old hopes. Mine is a very different story, but it all turns out the same.

One of the reasons I sit here in the sand, hating what I've become, is the boy. Such a long time, such a long search, lying to clerks and parish priests to get the names of children living in the town and suburbs, making up ridiculous aliases, then crying in a motel room and wondering if I would ever find you. You were so well hidden. The way the young prince in fairy tales is hidden from the ogre: in a trunk, in a thorny grove, in a dull place of meager enchantment. Little hidden Sammy. But the ogre always finds the child, doesn't he? For here you are.

If you are reading this, dear Sammy, don't despise me. I am a poor old man; I never meant you any harm. Don't remember me just as a childhood demon, though I have been that. I have lain in your room at night and heard your breathing roughen the air. I have whispered in your ear when you were dreaming. I am what my father always said I was-I am a freak, a monster-and even as I write this (forgive me) I am watching you.

You are the one playing baseball with your friends as the sunlight comes and goes through your golden hair. The sunburned one, clearly the boss, the one the other boys resent but love; it's good to see how much they love you. You are up to bat but hold out your hand because something has annoyed you; an itch, perhaps, as just now your hand scratches wildly at the base of your blond skull, and after this sudden dervish, you shout and return to the game. Boys, you don't mean to be wonders, but you are.

You haven't noticed me. Why would you? To you I am just the friend in the sandbox, scribbling away. Let's try an experiment: I'll wave my hand to you. There, see, you just put down your bat to wave back at me, a smile cocked across your freckled face, arrogant but innocent of everything around you. All the years and trouble it took for me to be here. You know nothing, fear nothing. When you look at me, you see another little boy like you.

A boy, yes, that's me. I have so much to explain, but first you must believe:

Inside this wretched body, I grow old. But outside-in every part of me but my mind and soul-I grow young.

There is no name for what I am. Doctors do not understand me; my very cells wriggle the wrong way in the slides, divide and echo back their ignorance. But I think of myself as having an ancient curse. The one that Hamlet put upon Polonius before he punctured the old man like a balloon:

That, like a crab, I go backwards.

For even now as I write, I look to be a boy of twelve. At nearly sixty, there is sand in my knickers and mud across the brim of my cap. I have a smile like the core of an apple. Yet once I seemed a handsome man of twenty-two with a gun and a gas mask. And before that, a man in his thirties, trying to find his lover in an earthquake. And a hardworking forty, and a terrified fifty, and older and older as we approach my birth.

"Anyone can grow old," my father always said through the bouquet of his cigar smoke. But I burst into the world as if from the other end of life, and the days since then have been ones of physical reversion, of erasing the wrinkles around my eyes, darkening the white and then the gray in my hair, bringing younger muscle to my arms and dew to my skin, growing tall and then shrinking into the hairless, harmless boy who scrawls this pale confession.

A mooncalf, a changeling; a thing so out of joint with the human race that I have stood in the street and hated every man in love, every widow in her long weeds, every child dragged along by a loving dog. Drunk on gin, I have sworn and spat at passing strangers who took me for the opposite of what I was inside-an adult when I was a child, a boy now that I am an old man. I have learned compassion since then, and pity passersby a little, as I, more than anyone, know what they have yet to live through.

Copyright ©2001-2003 Farrar, Straus and Giroux view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

Questions from the Publisher's Reading Guide:

1. What did the novel’s epigraph and opening sentence mean to you when
you began the book, and what do they mean to you now? Are they romantic
notions, statements on the hopelessness of love, or perhaps something in between?

2. When you began this book, did you consider growing younger to be only
positive? Do you believe that now? Looking at Max’s life, what are some of
the advantages of true old age?

3. In his focus on Alice, has Max missed the one person who truly loved him
his whole life—Hughie? Is it ever easy to recognize such devoted people in
our lives?

4. What is society’s basis for determining whether a lover is an appropriate
age? In what ways does Max’s condition actually help illuminate his true
character?

5. Max loves Alice as a daughter, as a wife, and as a mother. How does this
echo the various roles a lover plays in our lives? Which of Max’s roles is he
best suited to? Do we always take on recurring roles when it comes to love?

6. Are Max’s fears of infancy—the inability to walk independently, care for
himself, and articulate his needs—very different from the traditional fears
of growing old?

7. Greer frequently allows his narrator to address the reader directly, occasionally
in a cheeky tone. How much of the plot surprised you, in spite of the
intimate, candid aura created by Max?

8. Max’s memory of his first kiss with Alice is nothing like her recollections
of that same event. What do you make of the varying perceptions offered in
the novel? Is Max a trustworthy narrator?

9. Max’s first role in Alice’s life is as her “Shabbos goy.” Does Max later continue
to be the “houseboy of her heart” in some way, an aid in her life?

10. Is Max’s reverse aging the only thing standing in the way of his happiness?
How much of his outcome is affected by his personality, fate, and other
factors?

11. Max’s condition gives him unusual opportunities—for instance, having
access to his son’s life that few fathers have ever had. Does it deepen or erase his role as a parent? Though they both appear to be boys, is there still a generation
gap between Max and his son?

12. The word confession carries connotations of wrongdoing or scandal on
the part of the speaker. To what is Max Tivoli confessing in his “memoir”?
Is first-person narration crucial to this plot?

13. Greer embeds countless historical details in the novel, such as the use of
collars for mailing notes after the earthquake and the seated poses struck by
women accustomed to wearing bustles. What does the novel teach us about
the quirks of daily life a century ago?

14. Alice is not a typical Victorian woman. She is hotheaded and freethinking;
what do you think of her as a match for Max? Is she merely self-centered
and flaky, or do you agree with Victor Ramsey’s theory that she
changed her life through the only means available to women during that
time period: marriage? What is Alice’s ultimate reason for leaving Max?

15. Max struggles to make his outward appearance both socially acceptable
and less at odds with his psyche. Describe what your external appearance
would look like if it were a picture-perfect representation of your psyche.

16. How did you feel when you read of Hughie’s death? Why do you think
he killed himself? Did the modern idea of a “gay man” exist back then?
Given that at the time even openly gay Oscar Wilde had a wife and children
(as Hughie did), what options did gay men and women have for happiness or
love?

17. What would you have done with a life like Max’s? Is he an idealist, an
artist in a world not made for him, or a brute who squandered a potentially
happy life? What are the sources of a truly happy life? In what ways have
you “grown younger” in your own life?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Excerpt
»	Publisher's Reading Guide
»	Author's Web Site
»	Today Show April 2004 Book Selection

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