Andrew Sean Greer on comic novels' 'double-processing'
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- Andrew Sean Greer argues comic novels require what he calls "double-processing" — first working through characters' hardships realistically (even tragically), then writing as if it's all just a funny story, which he likens to "blond hair at the salon"
- Greer says comedy also frees writers to use richer, zestier language — specifically "hullabaloo and brouhaha and hubbub and chivaree" — words that would read as pretentious red flags in serious fiction
- In Less Is Lost, Greer grappled with how to portray visits to forced labor plantations in the American South, ultimately realizing the comedy was the absurdity of white visitors' guilt and anxiety, portrayed "with a different emphasis" but almost identically to his notes
- Greer's latest novel Villa Coco, drawn from his Tuscany diaries, centers a younger American man at a rural Tuscan train station "so fanciful one might unwrap it and find it was chocolate," plus a princess who hasn't mastered "the American dialect" and a wild animal thrown through a window
- Greer classifies unexpected works as comic novels — including Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (which he singles out for the coin nailed to a masthead) and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire ("the worst best poem you've ever read")
- Greer traces a tradition of comic writers shaped by darkness — Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Thornton Wilder, and precursors including Cervantes, Chaucer, and Shakespeare — and notes many readers in "these difficult times" are reaching for Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm
Why it matters: Greer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, makes a concrete case that comic fiction is a more demanding genre than tragic fiction, because it requires the writer to honestly face grief, death, and pain before deciding to transmute it. For readers sifting through an overflow of apocalyptic novels and films, he reframes the comic novel as a temporary, artificial fix for weighty human truths — offering companionship ("a friend to hold your hand when the lights flicker out") rather than escape.
