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.