MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
In 2016, the year before Andrew Sean Greer published his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Less," he received an invitation to a friend's birthday celebration in Cuba.
ANDREW SEAN GREER: I was the only one who came (laughter).
KELLY: This friend was a baroness, the director of an artist residency in Tuscany and about to turn 90. She told Greer she was getting older. She was ready to step down as director. And she asked, would he move to Italy to take her place?
GREER: It just seemed like the kind of offer that absolutely everyone in the world would say no way, except for me.
KELLY: Now a decade after saying yes, the 55-year-old still lives in Italy and is out with a new novel, inspired by everything that surprised him as an outsider in Italy and the friend who brought him there in the first place. NPR's Elena Burnett has more.
ELENA BURNETT, BYLINE: The sound of concrete drilling outside Greer's part-time San Francisco residence is something you'd be hard-pressed to hear in Venice.
GREER: There's hardly any concrete. It's all water.
BURNETT: But Venice has its own peculiar troubles, like where to source furniture for the apartment Greer and his husband moved into almost two years ago.
GREER: You have to look on their sort of Facebook Marketplace, find people willing to drive to a canal and then hire a boat. Oh, it's so funny to be on a boat and ducking under bridges with a sofa.
BURNETT: That's the kind of farcical adventure that could have been pulled from the pages of Greer's new book "Villa Coco." The story follows an American in his early 20s, nameless for most of the book, hired as an archivist for a rural Italian country house. But he stumbles his way into a catch-all assistant with a growing list of responsibilities, including harvesting olives, feeding a pen-eating dog and - oh, yeah - some light theft. His employer? A boisterous 92-year-old globe-trotting baronessa, just like Greer's dear friend who brought him to Italy in the first place. But Greer didn't set out to paint a portrait of her.
GREER: But I did want to get that sense of sort of wildness and mischief - that a person, even in their 90s, can take delight in new things, in causing trouble, in finding new adventures. Just a curiosity and a will for life to continue.
BURNETT: Her way of life was one that the buttoned-up, organized Greer had to wrap his head around when he first took over as director of the residency. He had formulated a structured plan for schedules, for communication, even for gardening.
GREER: And of course, that was unacceptable.
BURNETT: The spontaneity inherent to la dolce vita baffled him as much as it frustrates the main character of "Villa Coco."
GREER: He's not being told anything, and everything's a crisis that has to be solved in that moment in a panic, like going to the secondhand stores, and he has to take a road that's too dangerous to drive on. But the baronessa in the back is just having the time of her life because they might die at any moment. If they planned ahead, they could have taken the real road, but it's much more fun this way.
BURNETT: Greer links that kind of sentiment to Italy's difficult past, its present economic struggles and a lack of any optimism that dreams may come true.
GREER: So they focus very much, I think, on this present moment and this pleasure we're having right now, which was a nice change for me because I can have both the American optimism and a switch to we don't know what horror comes tomorrow, but for sure we have this.
BURNETT: For instance, something as pedestrian to a Californian as an artichoke.
GREER: And then you realize it's special. Let's eat the artichokes because they'll be gone. We won't have them in a few weeks. So let's indulge, and then, you know, it'll be fennel soon enough.
BURNETT: Celebrating those fleeting indulgences was part of Greer's intention to make "Villa Coco" what he calls a modern charm novel. That is, a book that doesn't simply offer a mindless escape into another world, but rather helps us find lasting joy in our own.
GREER: I just felt like, could I write a book that would be an utter delight and would make the reader close it and sort of hold it to their chest and want to stay there for a little while and hope the phone doesn't ping with a message? Just for a little while.
BURNETT: But of course, the phone will eventually ping, and the concrete drilling might continue outside. But the magic in Greer's writing is that no matter what noise or chaos life may throw at you, there's a decent chance that somewhere down the line, it'll become a funny story to tell. Elena Burnett, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF ANGELO PETISI'S "MALINCONICA LUNA") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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