September, 2003

Thursday evenings just got a lot more interesting as MacDowell Downtown returns to the Peterborough Historical Society for its second season on September 4, 2003, at 7:30 pm. Last year's enormously successful lineup of composers, visual artists, writers, and filmmakers begins anew when MacDowell Downtown welcomes distinguished short-story writer and novelist Andrew Sean Greer.

Greer, who is from San Francisco, will read from his forthcoming novel The Confessions of Max Tivoli and two previous works, his first novel The Path of Minor Planets and short-story collection How It Was for Me. He will also take questions and sign books following the reading. As always, free refreshments are provided courtesy of the MacDowell kitchen.

The Confessions of Max Tivoli is an ambitious novel tracing the life of a man who, in mid-Victorian San Francisco, is born with a deformity that causes him to age backwards. The novel is his memoir begun at age 60 as he sits in a sandbox contemplating the scope of his life. That life consists of falling in love with the same woman three times at three different points, befriending his own son at similar ages and learning about his private life better than any ordinary father, as well as living through the Chinese immigration camps on Angel Island and the great earthquake of 1906.

The bending of time to determine how it informs a life is a theme Greer confesses to exploring often in his work. In fact, the new book he plans on beginning at MacDowell concerns a man whose life unravels in three different historical periods, the protagonist meeting his fellow characters in different contexts during each one. “I find myself fascinated by the two ideas that we are absolutely constructed by our time and that nothing ever changes.” Contradictory? Perhaps. But could they also be simultaneous truths? In both novels, Greer's readers seem poised to learn that while the strictures of one's age can be obstacles to self-fulfillment, it is the will for fulfillment that remains universal. And the struggle for that fulfillment remains the most compelling and most re-readable story in literature.

For Greer, who claims to rarely use the present tense in his work, serving up the past to a more “modern” audience is a writerly trick that inspires contemporary questions: What might be the obstacles to fulfillment in our age and which of our conventions today might seem untenable to future generations? And his most vexing question of all: What is the purpose of our being alive now?

Coming of age and the loss of innocence that defines it is something McCabe revisits in her work. She finds them both profoundly relevant to all of life's changes. In her film September 5:10 pm, a stirring eight-minute docudrama about the death of her father, McCabe splices the messages left on her answering machine during that tragic time with painterly images of childhood. It is the kind of expressionist film that is felt not interpreted, and here again, she communicates the juxtaposition of appearance and reality, this time through the lens of tragedy. We are privy to the outpouring of love by family and friends at the same time we are struck by her desolation. “The film was about finding a way to document absence,” she says.

There is something worthwhile about seeing a young artist, especially one in a youth-obsessed culture, embrace the onset of adulthood in spite of its attendant losses. Understanding how those losses become gains by virtue of the truths they impart makes the transition that much more meaningful and moving. “Being an adult is knowing that time is not forever,” says McCabe before pulling her hair into a ponytail.