Accident prone

Meanwhile, Jensen takes us into Louis’s mind, as he communes with figures from other worlds. We are offered a running commentary on his life so far, while a creepy figure called Gustave whose “head’s wrapped in bandages with blood on” keeps him company. Louis seems set to cause trouble even while comatose.

Suspicious, incriminating letters, signed with his name, start appearing. The police are called, and Dr Dannachet, his neurologist, is both scared and baffled.

While most of the links fall into place, some elements of this psychological euro-thriller remain deliberately murky. Jensen is fascinated by the hinterland of the unconscious and she relies on a combination of magic realism and sci-fi to give a sense of Louis’s borderline existence. The result is not so much a novel as a script winging its way into production (it is soon to be made into a film directed by Anthony Minghella). The French neurology clinic will make for some excellent long shots, with our frozen faux-naïf providing a disturbingly lucid voiceover. But a heavy-handedness about the melodrama, and an earnestness about the tale, may slow things down. Jensen is continually base-touching with the Zeitgeist, and her efforts to cover everything from husband-battering to Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy verge, at times, on state-of-the-nation cliché. Nevertheless, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax is a quirky and original read.

While the premise of Andrew Sean Greer’s third novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, is far more fabulous, its relationships are played out more subtly. Max suffers from a peculiar reverse ageing condition. At birth, in 1871, he appears to be 70 years old, with “liver-spotted” baby arms and a face “re-upholstered in elephant’s skin, buttoned with the clouded, sad blue eyes of the blind”. Now, he writes the story of his life from the sandpit, in the body of a young boy: “At nearly sixty, there is sand in my knickers and mud across the brim of my cap. I have a smile like the core of an apple.”

“Inside this wretched body,” he writes, “I grow old. But outside — in every part of me but my mind and soul — I grow young.” When he falls for Alice, he looks 53. He spies on the 14-year-old girl, wandering in her chemise and pantaloons, like a “gargoyle perched above her”. He’s only 17. Apart from a brief respite, when Max’s physical appearance and mental age collide, his life has been a masquerade. As with Audrey Niffenegger ‘s The Time Traveller’s Wife, or Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers, these distortions of the conventional sense of time cause numerous problems for Max’s love life, and The Confessions of Max Tivoli unfolds as a mythic, Proustian romance.

Greer sets this tale against the background of San Francisco. As Max grows younger every day, he traces the changing face of the city with its earthquakes and brothels, automobiles and department stores. When Max meets Alice again, she does not recognise his younger self. They marry, and this time he is haunted by the fear that she may be repulsed by his youthful body, his brightening hair, his face unlining every day.

Max spends some time wondering about the roots of his “ancient curse”, reading myths and histories of other “time-altered creatures”, concluding that he is alone in his fate. But while his hero may be “a rare thing”, Greer’s tale has roots in Wonderland. This fantastical story revolves around the desire for innocence. Max is in love with Alice, but as he grows older, it’s clear that he is also in love with what she stood for; the ideal childhood that he never had, nor, despite his increasing youth, ever will.

Lost boys and strange bodies will always make sensations. But the best writing on the subject manages to capture not just the thrill, but the banality, of oddness. Greer’s achievement is to show how extraordinary creatures like Max may touch us in the most ordinary and moving ways. Despite time warps and cellular impossibilities, The Confessions of Max Tivoli is a brilliant story about the simplest of brief encounters, the encounter with life.