Andrew Sean Greer’s Villa Coco challenges the conventional ways objects are valued, arguing that true worth doesn’t lie in market price or historical provenance; it is found in the personal stories, memories, and emotions an object contains. The narrator, an archivist trained to assess items according to widely held standards, finds his professional methods useless at Villa Coco, where the Baronessa’s collection is governed by a subjective and whimsical system of valuation. The novel suggests that the collection of a lifetime is a physical manifestation of memory and identity, whose meaning is accessible only to its owner. The central plot, a grand deception involving forged art, ultimately posits that the story behind an object can be more valuable than the object itself.

The novel immediately establishes the tension between subjective and objective when the narrator’s initial attempts to catalog the villa’s treasures are thwarted by the Baronessa’s idiosyncratic criteria. When he tries to categorize her collection, she dismisses his methods, explaining that her objects are arranged by “affinità” (74), or personal affinity. This principle is best illustrated when she challenges him to identify the one truly priceless item in her entrance hall. After he guesses incorrectly, she reveals that it is a stolen big toe from a Roman sculpture in Istanbul, valuable only because of the memory of the adventure she shared with her dear friend Oscar. Its worth is emotional and historical only to her. Another example she offers is the stone fragment from a Cairo wall, which she admits is “worthless” but keeps for the story attached to it. For the Baronessa, an object’s value is a secret between it and her, built through history and experience, rendering outside appraisal meaningless.

The most prominent object in the villa, a bronze sculpture of a two-masted boat, exemplifies this theme. It is not an antique or a famous artwork, but it holds a central place in the entrance hall because it represents the Caprice, the boat the Baronessa considers the “love of her life” (135). The sculpture’s value is purely symbolic, a stand-in for her ultimate desire for freedom, adventure, and a life at sea. Its monetary worth is irrelevant; its emotional resonance is paramount. When she finally reacquires the actual boat, the sculpture has served its purpose as a placeholder for a lifelong dream. The narrative uses the sculpture to connect the Baronessa to the boat, making the object’s significant solely as a repository for her dream.

The novel’s culminating caper is its final statement on The Subjective Value of Objects. The Baronessa sells Villa Coco and its entire collection to her old rival, Furman Childress, but only after she and Oscar have systematically replaced the most valuable artworks with forgeries. The narrator’s professional task, to create an official catalog, becomes an act of complicity in this grand prank. The notarized list he produces is an inventory of fakes, rendering his work a piece of fiction, although he doesn’t know this until after the fact. Furman doesn’t know about the forgeries, and so to him, the objects in the villa still hold the same value. The Baronessa, however, has converted the real objects into funding her dream of purchasing the Caprice and sailing away. The value of the villa’s artifacts is determined by the owner, reinforcing the novel’s assertion that value of the things we own are not the objects themselves but the history and experiences they represent.