13 Jun 2026
issue 13 June 2026
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The comic novelist Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Less, a chronicle of the longings and humiliations of modern life. But now, he suspects, we’d all like an escape. ‘Whatever happened to the charm novel?’ he asks in his new outing, thinking of the lighter works of Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene. Since they are apparently out of fashion, he has decided to write his own. Villa Coco follows a young American archivist, hired to catalogue the antiques in Tuscany of an aged baronessa, known to her friends as ‘Coco’, only to find himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures instead.
He arrives in late summer, with all the American fantasies of Italy in tow: ‘A confection of movies and food… pasta and accordions and Leonardo and cheese.’ The novel satirises these ideas even as it succumbs to them (hence it gains subtlety in the autumn and winter sections). But he is met by Italians with disdain for Americans: to them he can’t dress, knows nothing about food and speaks English in some incomprehensible dialect. He undertakes a whole cultural education in everything from anchovies to Vasari, with ‘one simple aim: becoming less American’. It’s cheering to see European standards prevail.
