Less — Andrew Sean Greer (2017)
Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is hilarious. The novel also won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, a rare feat for a funny book. But, save this thought – where was the internet?
Arthur Less is a lovely guileless man in San Francisco who is about to suffer the double indignity of turning the incredibly old age of 50 and dealing with a wedding invitation from his partner who has left to marry another man. Rather than suffer the whispers and sidelong glances of his friends and rivals at the wedding, Less elects to go on a solo tour around the world. The action of the novel is organized in his experiences at various stops – New York City, Mexico City, Turin, Berlin, Morocco, India and Japan.
Less brings his incredibly self-conscious inner dialogue to all situations. He is a spectacle – tall, thin, handsome, blond lanky hair, all gangly knees and elbows. Whether he has a steady partner or not, he is unable to avoid falling into bed with the next charming, interesting man he meets. But, true to his innocent self, he is not a trollop; rather, he’s just taken with whatever moment of sensuality and experience presents itself.
Less is a writer of novels, mostly novels of San Francisco gay men processing their lives while aging. Less is told by a few of his fellow gay authors that he is a “bad gay” because he does not provide uplifting inspirational experiences for his characters. A large part of the charm of Less is that he is incapable of vindictiveness or cynicism. When told that he is a bad gay author, he is not angry. Instead, he is mystified, perplexed, and a bit sad. He doesn’t write for intellectual literary purposes; rather, he just writes with a wandering, daydreaming imagination of men for better or worse.
You will laugh out loud while reading Less on the subway. Greer has an easy, effortless yin-yang writing style in which he’ll mention a few facts about a character or scene, and then double back a few pages later to knock your head off with the irony or absurdity of those scenes when revived in a slightly different context.
Less is such a sympathetic daydreamer, and his lack of an edge rewards him, always to his surprise, with lucky turns. He is the boy who somehow found himself playing in Little League (on a team that was forced to include him). He is the boy picking dandelions and watching the pretty butterflies in right field while the game is going. He’s also the boy who, alerted by cheers of fans, looks up to find that a fly ball has somehow landed in his glove. It is his one and only moment of sports glory.
He travels the world as a moderately successful author, mostly on literary junkets paid by an Italian literary prize competition, a Berlin university in need of a visiting lecturer, and a men’s magazine seeking an article on Japanese cuisine. We incrementally learn of his relationships to the two steady partners he has had in his life, with reminisces subtly and beautifully interwoven throughout the book. Arthur Less is a man of a consuming inner voice that blots outs the hustle of the world around him – with a voice worrying of his appearance, travel directions, and the approaching milestone of his 50th birthday.
The action occurs in our contemporary world, but there is a huge missing ingredient – the internet and smart phones. Many of the misunderstandings and foibles throughout the book would have not occurred in a wired world in which one can learn in real time of directions, agendas, travel challenges – and changes in relationships back home. In a significant sense, our innocent Less would not have found himself in many of his hilarious misunderstandings had he simply checked his email. The suspension of our disbelief of this oversight is worth our while. In a sense, it reminds us that our phones serve as gigantic spoilers of our wired real-time experiences.
It is hard to not love our Arthur Less. The fact that he would never have guessed that he is loveable makes him all the more lovely.
Bob Fall 