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].