The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

From the first sentence ("The impossible happens once to each of us"), I was completely drawn in, ready to be enchanted, and The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells delivered. I read it in one great gulp, and it's already on my "to reread" list; because the time period changes, a slower (or second) read could help keep all the details and different storylines straight.

The book begins with Greta in late October of 1985. Due to her twin brother Felix's death of AIDS and her longtime lover Nathan's leaving, she is suffering from depression, and is undergoing a course of electroconvulsive therapy. As a result of this, Greta wakes up in 1918 - in the same apartment in the same city, her aunt Ruth nearby, her brother Felix still alive. show more

Eventually, it becomes apparent that there are three different Gretas, cycling through each other's times and lives: 1918, 1941, and 1985. We follow only the original 1985 Greta, though the other Gretas leave traces of their activities behind, little things changed. In each time, the same characters appear: Felix, Ruth, and Nathan, as well as Felix's love interest Alan and Greta's love interest Leo.

Each of the Gretas is receiving her time period's equivalent to electroconvulsive therapy, so that the three Gretas rotate times on a schedule (a day in 1918, a week in 1941, etc.). However, when one Greta misses a treatment, the other two switch places (instead of cycling through all three) until she returns.

As the original 1985 Greta nears the end of her treatments, she must decide where she will be happiest, and where she is most needed - in the present, or in the past.

Greer's writing is beautiful but not showy, and the story could be described as spare without this writing style: when one pauses, there is so much to wonder about and untangle. Greer, however, seems less interested in the details of how a woman from 1985 would fit into a life in 1918 or 1941, and more concerned with the personal relationships in each era, and the different versions of Greta and everyone around her - of how people are shaped by their time. ("I knew that not all lives are equal, that the time we live in affects the person we are, more than I had ever thought. Some have a harder chance. Some get no chance at all....I saw so many people born in the wrong time to be happy." (260))

Quotes

Who would ever guess? Behind the gates, the doors, ivy. Where only a child would look. As you know: That is how magic works. It takes the least likely of us, without foreshadowing, at the hour of its own choosing. It makes a thimblerig of time. And this is exactly how, one Thursday morning, I woke up in another world. (4)

...my mind unlatched, and then I found myself elsewhere. Don't bring me back, I remember thinking: Take me away. (17)

Who are we when we're not ourselves? (17)

My aunt sat very still and regarded me with the simplicity of someone who is deciding whether to take you either very seriously, or not seriously at all; there is no halfway anymore. (20)

How awful, to sense that everybody knows the thing that would change your life, and yet no one is friend enough to tell you! (39-40)

I was not borrowing these other Gretas; I was becoming them. (62)

What was most wonderful about my journeys, I now believe, was that I alone could appreciate the beauty of those worlds....I was that visitor who comes to a country and finds it charming and ridiculous all at once. (65)

...and yet of course we forget that when the dead come back to life, they come back with all the things we didn't miss....They aren't fixed; they're just back. (71)

"It's easy to say something is all in your head. It's like saying a sunset is all in your eyes." (81)

But no...I realized that being this close to peace, to the end of all that horror, was not like being close to the end of a novel; you could not weigh the final pages in your hand. They did not know....That very soon the war would end. (91)

A shift in weather, and we are a different person. The split of an atom, and we change....It takes so little to make us different people. (104)

How selfish love is, though we never think of it that way. We think of ourselves as heroes, saving a great work of art from destruction, running into the flames, cutting it from its frame, rolling it up and fleeing through the smoke. We think we are large hearted. As if we were saving it for anyone but ourselves, and all the time we don't care what burns down, as long as this is saved. The whole gallery can fall to ashes for all we care. That love must be rescued, beyond all reason, reveals the madness at the heart of it. (106-107)

...and what vicious Cassandra could shout there was another coming? Who would even dare? Perhaps they knew. There is always another coming... (110)

The heart will hear only one sound. (112)

Strange how briefly life is worth the pain. (114)

Our heart is so elastic that it can contract to a pinpoint...but expand almost infinitely... (115)

Women must be careful what we say to one another. We are almost all we have. (141)

I had fooled myself into thinking that, as a planet with water implies some kind of life, a world in which husbands stayed implied some kind of loyalty. But a minor miracle is needed for life... (145)

I suppose she was a woman who saw through absolutely everything, and bore the burden of it. How frustrating it must have been, to watch the rest of us blind to it all, or pretending to be blind, when it was all so obvious if one just looked directly at each person, and listened precisely to what they said, and watched what they did, and cared enough to imagine their lives. (147)

"We're so breakable, and we never guess it." (158)

...every moment is changeable. How strange, for the present to change the past! In just this way, I lived in these worlds knowing something like the future: a sense of how things could be. Isn't this the time traveler's curse? I did not see what was to come, but I saw the possibilities. (213)

Even lovers can't know; an angel in their mind flies back and rewrites the past to make it perfect....It had happened before, was happening in another time, and I alone knew that here it would happen again. (226)

When has a woman every been forgiven? Can you even imagine it? (241)

But how do you say good-bye to someone who does not know it is good-bye, will never know? (246)

What is a perfect world except for one that needs you? (282) show less

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like had I made different decisions at key points in time. There are many books that take that curiousity and use it as a plot device. But how many of them actually posit multiple universes where the same people live in vastly different time periods? A multitude of Kristens living in different historical times. This oddly intriguing idea is the premise in Andrew Sean Greer's newest novel, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells.

In 1985, Greta Wells is clinically depressed after the loss of her beloved twin brother, Felix, to AIDS; the imminent loss of Felix's partner, Alan, also to this terrible plague; and the breakup of her long time relationship with partner Nathan. She tries everything show more she can to overcome the depression but in the face of failure after failure finally agrees to try electroconvulsive therapy or ECT. Her doctor reassures her that there will be no side effects other than a lessening of the depression and a sleepiness.

But after Greta's first procedure, she wakes up to find herself in 1918 rather than 1985. She's still Greta from 1985 though she's inhabiting Greta from 1918's body. In this universe, she's married to Nathan although he's off fighting the last days of WWI and seeing the ravages of the flu epidemic. This Greta is a lonely one who is flirting with a young actor named Leo in her husband's absence and being encouraged in this by her unconventional aunt Ruth. More importantly to Greta, in this universe, her brother Felix is still alive and engaged to a senator's daughter. 1918 Greta is undergoing psychiatric treatment too and 1985 Greta wakes up following the 1918 treatment to discover that she is now in 1941, also still Greta but in still another version of her life. She is married to Nathan in this version as well, and they have a small son named Felix, after his uncle, again still alive, who is also married with an infant. This Greta is undergoing treatment after a terrible accident that rent her world and left her grief stricken. And so with each electrical shock, these three Gretas cycle through each others' lives.

The narration follows 1985 Greta throughout her cycle through the different time periods giving her more modern perspective on the lives that the other, earlier Gretas are living. As each of the Gretas are suffering, hence the need for psychiatric intervention, rather than waiting and holding on until the treatments take her back to her own time, 1985 Greta is determined to fix what she sees as being wrong in each of the others' lives. Ostensibly the other Gretas are doing the same thing so that there are three women who feel like they know what to change about the other lives they periodically lead. The greatest of these fixes is that 1985 Greta wants to tell her beloved Felix, in both 1918 and 1941, that he should live as himself, a gay man, regardless of the time period, social strictures, and danger of doing so. But she does not only interfere with Felix's life, she also makes decisions that reverberate with profound results through the other Gretas' lives as well.

Greer's vision of multiple concurrent universes is an interesting one. Each of the characters maintains a similar core being in each universe although the ways in which they interact with their society differs and does forge differences in them from one time to another. In essence, they are each many versions of the same person and that makes their choices in each time period fascinating. 1985 Greta is clearly searching for the things that are most important to her as she lives these other lives. Having a more modern character dropped into historical situations allows Greer to not have to focus on anachronistic behavior, because of course she'd act anachronistically. Each era is well written and despite Greta's desire to impose her modern ideas on the people around her in each one, Greer has presented the reality and the social mores of each time quite well. The choice of these particular time periods and the parallels between them are also nicely echoed in the different and yet still recognizable lives of each Greta.

The novel is filled with longing on the part of each of the different Gretas and it is very reflective in nature as 1985 Greta seeks to understand and improve her life as well as her alter egos' lives. But the perspective of the other Gretas, aside from small statements made by her colorful Aunt Ruth to the modern Greta each time she returns to her own time, is completely missing from the novel. It would have been fascinating to see the differences in her character wrought by the time periods in which they lived although that inclusion, would, of course, have made this a very different novel. As 1985 Greta becomes more accustomed to the other historical time periods of her life, her impact on each during her visits becomes more involved and intentional. The cyclical nature of the novel keeps the reader turning pages to see how everything is going to play out but there are moments where the pacing stretches like taffy with the reader ready to move on and the character still reflecting. In general though, this is a considered look at the nature of time, fulfillment, and love seen through a unique and creative lens. show less

A sarcastic, cynical female protagonist, history, and time travel? Yes please! I jumped at this immediately when it went on sale.

I have this bad habit of quickly scanning through the first few reviews on Goodreads when I first add a book. I know I shouldn’t do it, and I know I have what you could call an “easily influence-able personality”. But it’s hard to stop myself, and I did it again with this book. And reviews were mixed. And I went into the book with a heavy heart, not wanting to again be let down by a female-driven story. Especially written by a man.

But I’ve just come out on the other side and I am pleased to report this book lived up to my excited expectations. It is dark and grisly, not only emotionally, but also show more when dealing with war and illness and death. It does a fantastic job of illustrating the different lived experiences of a woman in 1918, 1941, and 1984 and contrasting them with how Greta deals with them. Not that it’s heavy on feminist theory (you get a feeling Greta would call herself a feminist, but it’s not her focus), but due to the issues she deals with in each time period, it’s noticeable.

It would be easy to say this book was written by one of those people that think “I would have rather been alive in the 20s!” and that’s where the story ends, but I think there is more to this story than that. There are nuances about twin siblings, about the AIDS epidemic, about war, about heartbreak, about friendship, about stereotypes, about choices. They are all simmering underneath. The only reason I can think that someone wouldn’t enjoy this book is because none of these things are fully realized - but I think that’s fair enough. Because these are all things Greta is dealing with and no one fully realizes anything in one calendar year of their lives (no matter the time period).

Either that or they don’t like where she ended up, which is ludicrous, because she absolutely made the right choice. show less

Read for Time Travel group. Maybe if people would actually participate in the discussion I'd be able to see what's so special about this. But here's what I said:

Deep into it but it's not making much of an impression. Dunno why, it's got some beautiful writing and some original ideas. Not SF, yet again, and as you know that's how I generally prefer my TT. But I think maybe the real problem is that I'm just not empathizing with Greta. Which begs the question of why not.... Oh well, I'm pretty sure I'll finish; it does feel like it might come together richly at the end.
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It did get richer/ deeper/ more significant. But still not for me.
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Later. I've figured out why. I feel as if the author is trying to teach somethings. Not just history, show more but how one should go about trying to 'fix' what's been 'going wrong' in one's life. For example, all three women named Greta tried to control events in order to keep love. And it wasn't up to each Greta to exert that kind of control over the man they thought that they loved. show less

“The Impossible happens once to each of us.”

I warn you now, I’m going to gush.

The speaker of the above sentiment is the eponymous Greta Wells, the first-person narrator of Andrew Sean Greer’s fourth novel. We are introduced to her as the story opens. It’s New York City, circa 1985, the height of the AIDS crisis. She has just lost her twin brother, Felix—to whom we are introduced in a flashback that occurs not long before his death—at the age of thirty-two. Greta’s grief is almost more than she can bear. When, a few months later, her long-term relationship dissolves, it is more than she can bear. A pervading sadness leads her eventually to the door of Dr. Cerletti, who will administer a course of 25 electroconvulsive show more therapy (ECT) treatments over a span of 12 weeks. The doctor warns she “might experience some disorientation afterward.”

What Greta experiences is more migration than disorientation. She awakens in a different time, a different life. A different Greta. After her first treatment, Greta finds herself in 1918. World War I is nearly over. Just as she finds herself inhabiting an altered version of herself there, so too she discovers alternate versions of the most important people in her life: Nathan, the lover who left her; her beloved, bohemian aunt, Ruth; and her brother, Felix. Alive.

After her second ECT treatment, Greta awakens in yet another version of her life. It is 1941, and America is about to go to war. Here again are versions of those she loves and a new version of herself and the life she might have lived. So the months pass, spending a day or a week rotating through these different lives in 1985, 1918, and 1941, each with its own joys and sorrows. Because, as Greta learns, no life is perfect.

That is the set-up of this moving masterpiece of a novel. Mr. Greer is rather brilliant in his choice of time periods. The beginning of a war is juxtaposed with the end of a war. The plague of AIDS is juxtaposed with the Spanish influenza of 1918. Changing social mores are examined, and our protagonist gets to explore the lives she might have known if some of her fondest wishes and greatest fears came true. Ultimately, it is up to her to decide the life she will lead, in an eerie echo of her lover’s words, “I leave it to you.” Greer writes:

“A shrew, a wife, a whore. Those seemed to be my choices. I ask any man reading this, how could you decide whether to be a villain, a worker, or a plaything? A man would refuse to choose; a man would have that right. But I had only three worlds to choose from, and which of them was happiness? All I wanted was love. A simple thing, a timeless thing. When men want love they sing for it, or they smile for it, or pay for it. And what do women do? They choose. And their lives are struck like bronze medallions. So tell me, gentlemen, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman?”

At times, I found it difficult to believe this novel was written by a man, so convincing was the voice of his female protagonist. I’m not sure how much I related to Greta, but I believed in her—despite a premise that required significant suspension of disbelief. And I didn’t have to love her, because I fell in love with those she loved, none more so than warm and colorful Aunt Ruth, a veritable Mrs. Madrigal of a woman, complete with kimonos. And I was deeply moved by the relationship of these fraternal twins, so eloquently conveyed by the author, a twin himself.

There are many echoes in this brief book. Echoes of other novels—though Greer’s tale is unique. I found myself reflecting upon stories as diverse as Ken Grimwood’s Replay, Jack Finney’s Time and Again, and even Baum’s Oz! Greta’s life had echoes of other lives, with lines of dialogue recurring like motifs in entirely different circumstances:

“When you were a little girl, was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?”

“I understood nothing! But it was a great show!”

“If only we just loved who we’re supposed to love.”

These are brief quotes, but I want to pull long passages from this novel. Greer’s prose is so beautiful it hurts. Indulge me once more:

“They say there are many worlds. 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—like the fairy worlds my aunt used to tease us with. You make a wish, and another world is formed in which that wish comes true, though you may never see it. And in those other worlds, the places 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? Because everyone knows this:

That the impossible happens once to each of us.”

I was very fortunate to receive a review copy of this extraordinary novel from the publisher in late 2012. I held on to it and made it my very first read of 2013. Will it make my top 10 list for the year? Absolutely. Will it be the single best novel I read in 2013? Very likely. But more than that, this is the book I will be foisting on friends 20 years from now. My love of Greta Wells will last a lifetime. show less

Excellent.
Beautifully written, thought provoking, and deep.

Greta's journey in this book is incredible.
First her twin brother dies, leaving her heartbroken because he was her closest friend. When he dies, it's like a piece of her is missing. If that alone wasn't bad enough, she now has to deal with the end of her ten year long relationship with her boyfriend Nathan. Her parents are long gone and the only one she has left in the world is her Aunt Ruth.

Greta goes for therapy, the doctors keep trying to help and one day decide on the most extreme course of treatment. Greta is giving a treatment like electric shock therapy that she's warned may cause delusions.

After the first treatment, Greta wakes in 1918. After her second treatment she show more wakes in the 1940's. Each body she inhabits is also a Greta, each one has a Nathan, but the other Greta's both still have their brother.

Greta gets fairly accustomed to this new cycle, floating back and forth between these lives and her current day. She's not delusional, she's actually another version of herself in each of these lives.

She's faced with some tough decisions, one of them being whether to go back to her real life or stay in one of these alternate lives.
Can you imagine? Her brother isn't dead, her boyfriend hasn't left her, but everything else is different. Could she be happy in her real life without her brother Felix? Is she even supposed to be with Nathan? And how will each decision she makes affect the lives of the other Greta's?

I loved it. Very unique. The characters are so well written and each experience and emotion so well described that you feel like you're part of Greta's journey too. show less

After her twin brother dies and her lover of many years abruptly leaves her, Greta Wells sinks into an unrelenting depression. Nothing she tries for it works. As a last ditch effort, she tries a series of shock treatments that have unexpected side effects: she finds herself first in 1918, then, after a second treatment, in 1941, before returning to 1985 after a third one. That she travels in time is weird enough, but in each era she is still Greta Wells, and the full cast of characters from her life is there, too: her aunt Ruth, lover Nathan, her brother Felix, Felix’s lover Alan as well as Dr. Cerletti to give her the shock treatments. Each era has differences, too; in both 1918 and 1941 Greta and Nathan are married, Felix is still show more alive but deeply closeted instead of living with Alan, one Greta has a child, one a lover. Yes, there are multiple Gretas- every time ‘our’ Greta changes eras, so do the other Gretas. This is not really a time travel story, because it makes no sense that the same set of people would exist in multiple times; it’s more a story of multiple universes. But that’s not the important part of the story. It’s the relationships that are important.

In each era, Greta places a different relationship in the primary place. To one, it’s Nathan, To another Greta, it’s her lover. To the third, it’s brother Felix. Each Greta is dealing with loss and/or the possibility of loss; the 1918 influenza pandemic, World War 2 starting in 1941 and an auto accident, AIDS in 1985. In each era, the Gretas are trying to fix the relationships most important to them.

But I had a hard time caring about Greta very much; she managed, despite her traveling in alternate worlds, to be boring. I didn’t like Nathan, who wasn’t much more than a cardboard cheater. Aunt Ruth was the most appealing but even she was sort of a generic eccentric, crazy enough to believe Greta’s tale of time travel. The book does, however, serve up a great line, uttered by Felix to a horrible rude woman: "When you were a little girl, Madam.....was this the woman you dreamed of becoming?" It’s a good question, one that propelled Greta to try and get things right in all three eras. It’s also a question we should all ask ourselves, before it’s too late to make things turn out better. I admit the ending surprised me, but that wasn’t enough to make me love the book. show less