LGBT Book & Video Blog

Praised for his 'perfumed, dandified style', Andrew Sean Greer is one of America's finest young writers. He tells Stuart Jeffries about the family secret that inspired his latest novel, The Story of a Marriage Tuesday July 8, 2008 The Guardian A long time ago in Kentucky, a man took Andrew Sean Greer's grandmother for a drive. The man, a family friend, told her something she didn't want to hear. During the war he and her husband had been lovers. How did she react, I ask Greer. "She just said to him: 'Get the hell out of here.'" Greer sits back in his seat. We're chatting in his publisher's offices in Bloomsbury. I lean forward, thinking Greer will continue the story. I'm expecting (this being the American south of the 1950s) passion, ruin, shame, marital recrimination, probably divorce, possibly the husband being named and shamed for his sexual orientation in the local newspaper.

But no. That's the end of the story. "My grandmother was not a great storyteller," says Greer. Didn't she confront her husband? "They never talked about it. That wasn't the era of psychoanalysis when everybody tells everybody everything and where there is a presumption that confession and confronting difficult personal issues is good for a relationship." Do you know if your grandfather was gay? "Well, he did spend a lot of time cleaning his shoes and looking after his appearance. I knew him until I was about 13. He was this guy in a chair." You never asked him? "I never did."

These are not small matters. His grandmother's sliver of a tale sparked Greer's latest novel, The Story of a Marriage. Like Greer's 2004 novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli, his new book comes to Britain with rave reviews. According to the New York Times: "Greer's considerable gifts as a storyteller ascend to the heights of masters like Marilynne Robinson and William Trevor." Whatever Greer inherited from his grandmother, it wasn't her shortcomings as a narrator. Greer is only 37 and John Updike has already compared him to Proust and Nabokov for his "perfumed, dandified style of disenchantment". He's a monster of precocity, with a (sickeningly well-founded) confidence in his talent scarcely imaginable among his transatlantic peers.

In the book, the eerie domestic calm of Pearlie Cook's marriage to her husband Holland in early 1950s San Francisco is disturbed by an elegantly dressed gentleman caller named Buzz. He has come not just to tell Pearlie that he and Holland were together during the war (he never, Pearlie notes, uses the word "lovers"), but also that he has "a proposal". It's not quite an indecent one, but it's pretty wild. He will give her $100,000 if she agrees to allow him to take her husband away, probably to New York, where a gay couple might just find a sympathetic corner to build a life together. She will be able to raise her boy Sonny in unimagined luxury, and spare him the shame of it becoming known that his daddy is homosexual. How can she refuse?

"In 1953, when the story is set, women did make sacrifices of this kind: she would have wanted to protect her son. Dad being exposed as gay would have been another mark against her son. It still goes on, that kind of naming and shaming of gay people," says Greer. Not, surely, in San Francisco? "No, but when I was living in Montana 10 years ago, they were trying to pass a law to put lesbians and gay men on the sex-offenders register." No! "Oh yes," says Greer. "My country is nothing if not diverse."

Home truths
guardian.co.uk, UK