Less

In the small, the writing is lovely. Arch observations and very funny scenes. But our main character manages to travel the entire world without living in it once.

It has to be purposeful, but every time Arthur has to deal with something emotionally difficult, it's at arm's length: a hard conversation with someone who is dying happens over Zoom. A hard conversation with someone Arthur wronged, just never really happens. Arthur never talks to his best friend/arch nemesis apart from a few sentences. Yes, he's literally running away from his problems (that's the premise), but surely over the course of the novel something has to break.

What would it be like to have to struggle to take care of a child? To take care of an elderly person? To stay committed to a single person for your whole life? To build a house with your own two hands? To revitalize a town, to save someone's life, to care for a rescue animal, to say what needs to be said, no matter how difficult? To pull the plug on someone, to accidentally hit someone with your car, to confront a rapist, etc etc. Arthur's story is devoid of most everything that makes life actually hard, so one of his biggest challenges is not being as attractive as he once was, and that makes the force of the novel quite weak, even if the writing is well done.

I realized that perhaps this isn't entirely the fault of the character or the author. Among Arthur's friends, people are worn like clothes and are equally disposable. One must be young, attractive, fun at parties, not old and a bore. There's not really a sense of community through thick and thin, or room for disability or age (very young or very old). In some sense, Arthur's preoccupation with his age is a problem for him not because he is unusually vain, but because of the very real danger that he might be abandoned if he's no longer sparkly.

I was disappointed that it ended with Arthur's boyfriend returning to him, since it seemed like the wrong thing for Arthur to learn. If it were more heterosexual, and a old superficial man was rewarded at the end with a hot young woman, I'd think that was awful. "Still got it!" is the wrong lesson. I would have liked to see Arthur stretched to become a larger person, like the protagonist in [b:Senlin Ascends|35271523|Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel, #1)|Josiah Bancroft|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1502224161l/35271523.SX50.jpg|24467682].

It's difficult to put my feeling into words for this book, so I'll just try to keep it succinct.

I have a feeling Arthur Less was written to be a likable character, but I did not like him. As another character in the book put it so well (intentional, no doubt), ..."A white middle aged American man walking around with his white middle aged American sorrows? ...sorry to tell you this, it's a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that."

Not to sound too "not like other gays" but I am confident that this book resonates deeply with gay men who are not me. The way partying, sleeping around with married men, and having painful relationships with insufferable writers is described, you'd think it was a universal experience, and I find the theme of "aging gay man coming to terms with being unlovable" to be a tired, boring conversation. All of the characters of substance in this book frankly, felt insufferable. But the numerous negative traits of the characters didn't seem to be written as character flaws. They were written as if that's just how people are. Incredibly harsh criticism of one's friends, infidelity, fake-deep monologuing on the birth and death of love and relationships...these are all written about as simple realities for many of the featured characters, which led me to the same question over and over again. Why the hell is Arthur friends with all of these terrible people, and what sad, sad circumstances made him feel that this is how normal people function?

But with all of that being said, I found the plot to be absolutely charming. I loved Arthur's journey and his varied experiences. I loved the introspection he had in each of the situations he found himself for each country. I even liked the overarching love story. But, I do feel like there were missed opportunities to tie his direct experiences in each country back to some sort of character development. I don't feel like Arthur actually GREW during the story. From Arthur's perspective, he goes on a long international trip to avoid a wedding and comes back when he finds out his ex boyfriend had a stroke, conveniently at the end of his trip. I wish I could have seen a bit more of a change in him.

This was a fun story if you make an effort to focus on just the story and to ignore how lousy all of the people seem to be.

3 1/2 stars. I really wish this site had more granular star ratings.

I'm not sure what to make of this novel. I got really enthusiastic during the first half. I found myself pulling quotes and admiring the prose style, which I didn't find astonishing so much as unique in its access to the protagonist's wisdom and I delighted in that. As the novel wore on, I delighted... less.

It became hard to escape the fact that Arthur Less is just a privileged white man feeling sorry for himself on an enviable world tour. Here's a thing about me: when I hear someone preface a purchase by saying a phrase along the lines of "It was more than I should have spent, but..." my little empathy sensors shut right down. Too expensive in my world means "no" because in my world money is actually finite and that defines my life experience. When money becomes an exercise in emotional checks and balances wholly separate from the final number of a bank account balance I believe a person's perception of the world has been altered away from being able to relate to a person like me. Briefly going over Andrew Sean Greer's Wikipedia page doesn't help, by the way.

I realize one of the "tricks" of the novel is to call out this state of privilege as a self-reflection in the novel Less himself is writing but I think I'm missing how this exalts the main story. I'm left grasping. On the one hand there is a very lovely arc of characters coming to terms with their relationships to each other and to their own sense of love and self. On the other hand, none of these characters are Arthur Less. He wades through these people but never seems to answer the questions he presented at the beginning of the story. He lucks into a lot of situations. He ends up with a happy ending, which was very nice, but unearned.

What did I miss? It must be something.

The plot description for this novel mentions that Arthur Less will be traveling the world to avoid attending an awkward social event, but it is so much more than that. Along the way, the reader gets to know Arthur and his history: his foibles, his taste, his fears, and his loves. I adore the way this is written. I enjoyed the humor and the cultural and literary illusions. Arthur Less is mourning his youth, his love, and his mother while struggling to write his next novel.

This was at turns funny and sad, and kept me entranced. It kept getting better. I loved the ending.

There is a Liza Minnelli song I've loved since childhood called "Ring Them Bells" in which a woman travels around the world, and winds up meeting the guy who has been living next door to her, all along. I was reminded of that song at the end of Greer's novel. In this case, Less is able
to reexamine the life he's lead all along with new eyes. Life is good.

I do recommend this!

Many of the movies that have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards shouldn't have. Raging Bull and The Elephant Man were better than Ordinary People, which was good but didn't deserve the 1979 Best Picture nod. I loved and still defend the 1976 winner, Rocky, but if I'm honest with myself, All the President's Men and Taxi Driver were better. And the best (worst?) example: Oliver winning over 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968. When was the last time you ever heard anyone talking about or referring to Oliver? That's right; 1969, after the award was given.
Despite mistakes like that, the movies that lost were worth seeing.
Andrew Sean Greer's Less won the Pulitzer Prize for 2018 and deservedly so. It's brilliant. Funny as hell and wise and a novel with a rare ending.
Here's a quick sample of Greer's writing that I landed on in a rush, right before dropping it off at the library:

It is a traveler's fallacy that one should shop for clothing while abroad. Those white linen tunics, so elegant in Greece, emerge from the suitcase as mere hippie rags; the beautiful striped shirts of Rome are confined to the closet; and the delicate hand batiks of Bali are first cruise wear, then curtains, then signs of impending madness.