Greer, A: Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

The story begins in 1985. After the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix, and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Nathan, Greta Wells sinks into an enveloping state of depression. At the suggestion of her doctor, and under the watchful eye of her flamboyant Aunt Ruth, Greta tries a radical therapy. But the treatment has unexpected effects, and Greta suddenly finds herself transported to the lives she might have lived had she been born in a different time.

During the course of her treatment, Greta repeatedly travels to 1918, 1941, and back to 1985. In these other worlds, she finds her brother, alive and well, though fearfully masking his true personality to escape the ostracism of an earlier age's prejudices. Here, too, she finds her former lover, Nathan, now her devoted husband. Will he be unfaithful to her in this life, as well? And if he is, will she behave exactly as she did before? In 1941 she is a devoted mother; in 1918 she is a bohemian adulteress.

As the cycle of treatments nears its end, tension mounts over the actions each Greta takes in her "other" lives. Married Greta has no intention of being abandoned by Nathan in 1985. Amorous Greta refuses to give up her young lover, Leo, for the stuffy respectability of being a doctor's wife in WWII. And what will happen once the Gretas stumble upon the secret for getting off this time-travel merry-go-round? Each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Who will choose to remain in which life?

Magically atmospheric--whisking us from the gas-lit streets and horse-drawn carriages of the West Village in 1918, to a martini-fueled lunch at the Oak Room in 1941 ("my handbag the size of an anvil...the ladies hats floating by like jellyfish"), gorgeously written and propulsive, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells casts a spell over the reader and will guarantee Greer's reputation as one of the most gifted writers of his generation.