Arthur Less’ former lover is getting married – to someone else. Rather than face a potentially awkward situation, Less, a wayward novelist, decides to say yes to every engagement that comes his way for a year, taking him on a trip around the world and allowing him to bypass Freddie Pelu’s wedding and his 50th birthday besides.
I picked up Less by Andrew Sean Greer after two years of teaching AP Literature. In the database of essay prompts provided for the course, the College Board has not one, but two passages from Less. I think there might only be two passages from all of Shakespeare, only one from all of Austen, just one Keats poem. Additionally, one of my students declared that the excerpt from Less was the “strangest thing they’d ever read” – after finishing Beloved. I was dying to read it to find out who this guy Arthur was.
Arthur Less, it turns out, is a middle aged, white, gay man. His most recent novel has been rejected by his publisher and he might just be more heartbroken about Freddy Pelu than he’s willing to admit. He makes for a hapless and charming protagonist, in turns underestimating and overestimating himself. The structure of the novel has him popping up in more and more outlandish and out of his element places, and through this we see his good nature, his desire to acquit himself well in his chosen profession, and, most of all, his deep loneliness. Without question, these are “first world problems,” but they are real and scary to Arthur Less, and though we will laugh at his mishaps, we will also feel for all his worries and aches and anxieties.
Less is filled with zany supporting characters and more hijinks than a normal person should ever find themselves in, let alone in one year. The novel is laugh-out-loud funny – truly – successfully skewering self-absorbed authors as well as the whole apparatus of academic conferences and guest teaching gigs and writers’ retreats that prop up the literary world. I couldn’t stop listening.
Less is a novel about loneliness, about aging, and about connection. Be prepared to laugh and to cry.
The Personal Library Project 