Less - Andrew Sean Greer

Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is part of my continuing project to read all ninety-four of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners before there are one hundred of them; it is the forty-second one I’ve read over the years.  Now admittedly, my first impression of Less, based entirely on its first fifty or so pages, had me doubting the committee’s 2018 choice, but in the end I agree that Less does indeed deserve its prize.

 Novelist Arthur Less is about to turn fifty, but he is not going to go down without a fight. In fact, Arthur grows more and more irritated when his overeager friends begin to label him a fifty-year-old weeks before his actual birthday, and he never misses an opportunity to remind them rather loudly that he is still a young man of forty-nine, thank you very much. But don’t let Arthur fool you; the man is feeling older and older every day, and that’s largely due to Freddy Pelu, Arthur’s onetime boyfriend, who will soon be marrying another man and heading to Tahiti.   

Arthur has been invited to the wedding, but he knows that attending without making a spectacle of himself is not going to happen.  So what can he do?  In a moment of brilliance, Arthur decides to accept every literary invitation on his desk that will get him out of San Francisco around the time of Freddy’s wedding. No matter how second rate or embarrassing an event may be, if it’s far from San Francisco Arthur Less is your man.  And that is precisely how Arthur will end up traveling around the world for the next new months in search of something he doesn’t even realize that he is looking for until he finds it: himself.

Andrew Sean Greer

First it’s New York to interview on stage a famous science fiction writer, then to Mexico City for a stage reading of his own, to Turin where he has been nominated for a literary prize he’s never heard of, to Berlin to teach a class at a German university, to Morocco where he plans to celebrate quietly his fiftieth birthday with others even if they are strangers, to India to stay at a writers retreat, and then to Japan to write an article for an American magazine.  Arthur even manages to squeeze in an unscheduled little adventure in Paris somewhere in there.  But because Less is largely a novel of self-discovery, nothing goes as planned, and Arthur is forced to spend a lot of time inside his own head where he figures out more about his past and his future than he would have thought possible before packing his suitcase.  

Call this satire, if you will; I call it a love story.  A good one.


Book Number 3,400