In Greer's time-traveling fourth novel (following The Story of a Marriage), the eponymous Greta skips between three different eras, and her life is intertwined with the same two characters (and other incarnations of herself) in each. Greta Wells, living in New York City in 1985, is devastated by her twin brother Felix's death from AIDS and the end of her long-term relationship with Nathan. To treat her crippling depression, she pursues electroconvulsive therapy, which begins a cycle of magical time travel. In 1941, Felix is alive and Nathan is her husband; and in 1918, Nathan is away at war and Felix, though still homosexual, is deeply closeted. As the Greta of 1985 explores these timelines, the versions of herself from 1918 and 1941 also travel to each other's eras. No timeline is perfect; each offers losses and compensations. Felix's stories provide an especially moving exploration of the limited choices available to gay people throughout history. The Gretas have surprisingly little solidarity, intruding into each other's lives without warning or permission. While Greer too often skimps on the period details that can give time travel stories a sense of reality, the novel's central questions-how does experience change us, and which relationships are worth sacrificing for-work to bridge its chronological jumps. Agent: Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Greer's (The Story of a Marriage; The Confessions of Max Tivoli) imaginative treatment of love and relationships shines again in his third novel. It is 1985 when Greta is faced with a debilitating depression after the death of her twin brother, Felix, and shortly thereafter the end of her marriage. She seeks electroconvulsive treatment, a succession of 25 procedures, for her condition. The doctor assures her it will not change her, only alleviate her depression. But with each treatment, a door is opened to a different life, either in 1918, 1941, or 1985. Although Greta keeps her feelings intact for her beloved brother, her former husband, Nathan, and her Aunt Ruth, the relationships change and mutate in each era she experiences. As her time travel escalates outsides the boundaries of her understanding and logic, Greta is faced with bracing herself for the unknown. VERDICT Fans of Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife will delight in following the thought process of time traveling while maintaining a hold on a singular identity. [See Prepub Alert, 1/6/13.]-Susan Carr, Edwardsville P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli, 2004, and The Story of a Marriage, 2008) cleverly reinvents that always popular staple: the time-travel novel. The story opens in 1985 as a severely depressed Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy in order to cope with the death of her beloved twin brother and a devastating personal betrayal by her long-term significant other. With each treatment, she is whisked back and forth through three different lives, landing in 1918, 1941, or 1985. As the eras change, she carries her circle of family and friends with her, and the setting New York's charming West Village remains a paradoxically evolving constant. Despite the fact that she is essentially the same person in every life, her choices, dictated as much by time and place as by personality and free will, are radically dissimilar. Philosophically intriguing as well as gorgeously imagined and executed, this novel will catch fire with the same audience that propelled Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) to the top of the best-seller list.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2010 Booklist

A woman inhabits three different selves in a time-travel novel from an author long fascinated by the manipulation of time (The Confessions of Max Tivoli, 2004, etc.). Young men are dying like flies. It's 1985, and AIDS is rampant, especially in Greenwich Village, where Greta Wells is mourning the death of her beloved twin brother, Felix. Not only that: Her longtime lover, Nathan, has left her for a younger woman. "Any time but this one" is what Greta yearns for. Her prayer is answered, sort of, when she begins a course of electroconvulsive procedures and finds herself, an earlier Greta, in 1918. Husband Nathan is away at war (about to end); on the homefront, Greta has an admirer, Leo, a virginal actor, while brother Felix, deep in the closet, is set to marry a senator's daughter. After her next procedure, Greta is in 1941, shortly before Pearl Harbor. Here again, she and Nathan are married, with a small son; she's recovering from a car accident. Felix, no longer in denial, is having a secret affair with Alan (by 1985, they'll be all the way out); when he's busted in a gay bar, his wife will divorce him. Another day, another procedure, another time shift. Greta is just a bird of passage in these other eras, which are quite as turbulent as her own: on the national scale, war and pestilence (the 1918 flu epidemic); on the domestic scale, infidelities (both earlier Nathans were cheating on her, while Greta's one night with Leo led to her pregnancy). Greta is monitoring two emotional upheavals, her own and those of Felix; all this leads to more confusion than enlightenment. Punches are pulled (Greta fails to confront the 1941 Nathan over his adultery), and melodrama blooms. Was all the back and forth worth it when all it yields is a small epiphany? The Confessions of Max Tivoli was more inventive and more satisfying.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

THE 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?" Needless to say, things don't work out as she hopes. As Greta soon learns, each world takes as much as it gives. "I knew that not all lives are equal," she observes, "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. With great sadness, I saw so many people born in the wrong time to be happy." The person who fits into none of these worlds is Felix, whose homosexuality imperils him in 1918 and 1941, and dooms him in 1985. In perhaps the novel's most haunting scene, Greta follows her twin to the men's department of a 1918 Bloomingdale's, "a field of wool and leather and oxblood and gray," where, from behind a screen, she watches him remove the jacket and tie from a mannequin. "He could not see me; the screen was pierced mahogany. But I could see him, and the other men in the shop, who looked around seemingly aimlessly, picking up silk and percale and broadcloth as if considering the material. Only a careful eye would notice. That each one of them, though holding, for instance, a long white scarf up to the light to check the quality, had his eyes all the time on my brother, undressing his lover." "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells" is a generous novel, and if at times, particularly in the first half, Greer's prose verges on the mawkish, if at times his handling of the grimmer aspects of his plot, in particular the ravages of AIDS, seems excessively polite, the reader should trust that certain bombs planted covertly in the early pages will explode in the later ones. Some arenas of historical experience are, it is true, given short shrift. Only glancing attention is paid to Greta's and Felix's material circumstances. Their careers are barely mentioned. A more troubling elision is politics. No reference is made in 1985 to the nascent AIDS activism movement. In 1918 there's a curious absence of immigrants, in 1941 of émigrés. More to the point, though the Wells twins are German by birth, the effect of their heritage on their attitudes to both world wars is never explored. (Despite being a New Yorker, Greta is surprised to discover that Yorkville is a German neighborhood.) Instead their Germanness serves merely as a plot device to keep Felix out of the military. It's a striking elision, and one that speaks to the fervidness with which Greer adheres to E.M. Forster's credo of personal relations. "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country," Forster once remarked, a sentiment Greta echoes, even more darkly: "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 largehearted. 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." After electroshock therapy, Greer's heroine wakes up in her own room - but not in her own time. 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.