None of this is particularly suspenseful — the novel’s chief revelation is telegraphed about halfway through the story — but the writing is occasionally quite funny, and the tale of an expat’s life in the gorgeous, seductive Italian countryside is engaging, as anyone who has seen a Merchant-Ivory film can tell you.
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Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco has the summery, entertaining feel of someone writing whatever he feels like writing ... Full of larger-than-life characters, doing larger-than-life things and teaching larger-than-life lessons ... Greer has such a light, nimble touch — the color of a dress or the studied messiness of a room conveys a lot — that Villa Coco reads like a grand adventure, not a lesson. Long story short: I have no notes, other than that I wish it were longer.
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Has no...satirical bite. For a while, it also has little in the way of shade to offset its sunniness. Put another way, this is la dolce vita with few unwelcome traces of sourness ... But it would be churlish to take Greer to task here. He clearly set out to produce a novel packed with warmth, wit, and charm, and he pulls this off admirably.
