Illustrations by Michael KirkhamThe clock is always ticking in Andrew Sean Greer’s “Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.” Elegiac in tone, this tale of time travel, loss and compromise is as precisely engineered as a Swiss watch. The premise is deceptively simple. It is 1985, and Greta Wells, a photographer living in Greenwich Village, has just suffered two devastating losses: Her twin brother, Felix, has died of AIDS and her lover, Nathan, has left her for another woman. Thrown into a deep depression, she consults a psychiatrist, who in turn sends her to Dr. Cerletti, an advocate of electroconvulsive therapy. “Will it change me?” Greta asks, before her first session. “Not at all, Miss Wells,” he replies. “What has changed you is your depression. What we’re trying to do is bring you back.” Instead the treatment takes Greta away. The next day she wakes up in her own room — but not in her own time. “Instead of my white walls, I saw pale lilac wallpaper patterned in ball and thistle. Gold-framed paintings placed along it, and sooty gaslight back plates.” Not only that, she’s a different Greta. “I marveled at the long red hair falling in waves over the delicate yellow nightgown I had never owned before, trimmed with little useless ribbons. I touched my face and wondered: What trick was this? How could this be me?”
The trick — and it’s an ingenious one — is this: The ECT procedure somehow allows Greta to travel across the 20th century to 1918, then to 1941, then back to 1985. In each of these worlds, the people and places are the same. Only the circumstances are different. In 1918, Greta’s twin, Felix, is alive and well, but engaged to Ingrid, a senator’s daughter, and having a secret affair with Alan, his lover of 1985. In 1941, he’s married to Ingrid, has an infant son and is again having an affair with Alan. Greta’s Aunt Ruth, her closest confidante, is almost exactly the same in 1918 as she is in 1985, but in 1941 she’s been killed in a car accident. Most bewilderingly for Greta, she and her lover, Nathan, are married in both 1918 and 1941. They have a young son in 1941, and Nathan has given up the woman for whom he left Greta in 1985. In 1918, it’s Greta who’s having the affair — with a much younger man named Leo.
To his immense credit, Greer — whose other books include “The Confessions of Max Tivoli,” about a man who is born elderly and grows younger by the day — manages the complexities of this temporal round robin with precision and panache. There’s nothing about Greta’s experiences that even suggests they might be delusional. On the contrary, what happens to her is all too real. Thus her beauty in both 1918 and 1941 disarms her: “For it had not occurred to me that I did not merely shift into another self. I shifted into another body.” More disturbingly, she soon discovers that when she is in 1918, her 1918 counterpart is in 1941 and her 1941 counterpart is in 1985.
All three Gretas, it turns out, are undergoing electroconvulsive therapy, just as all three Gretas hope to secure, in the worlds where they have been transported, the things they have lost in their own worlds. “It’s funny,” Aunt Ruth tells her. “You’re all the same, you’re all Greta. You’re all trying to make things better, whatever that means to you. For you, it’s Felix you want to save. For another, it’s Nathan. For this one, it’s Leo she wants to resurrect. I understand. Don’t we all have someone we’d like to save from the wreckage?”
In charting these extraordinary and overlapping journeys, Greer is nothing if not rigorous. What interests him isn’t the why and how of time travel — aside from almost cursory references to quantum physics and the idea of the “transmigration of souls,” the question is hardly pondered at all — but the What If? “They say there are many worlds,” Greta reflects early in the novel. “All around our own, packed tight as the cells of your heart. Each with its own logic, its own physics, moons and stars. We cannot go there — we would not survive in most. But there are some, as I have seen, almost exactly like our own. . . . And in those other worlds, the places you love are there, the people you love are there. Perhaps in one of them, all rights are wronged, and life is as you wish it. So what if you found the door? And what if you had the key?”
David Leavitt teaches at the University of Florida. His new novel, “The Two Hotel Francforts,” set in Lisbon in 1940, will be published in October.
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