book review of less by greer

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Less by Andrew Sean Greer review – a literary skewering of stealthy genius

T wo thirds of the way through Andrew Sean Greer’s latest novel, he risks letting his novelist hero – white, gay, knocking 50 – describe his latest novel, which has been turned down by his publisher. “It was about a middle-aged gay man walking around San Francisco. And, you know, his … his sorrows … ” “A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows?” replies his lesbian friend. “It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.” Greer can afford this moment of metafiction because, by this third act of the novel, his hero has won us over, for all that he enjoys most of the blessings of existence.

Despite its lampooning of the literary world, Less won this year’s Pulitzer prize for fiction , prompting its publication in Britain. It introduces us to minor novelist Arthur Less as he finds himself abruptly single, having coasted through a studiedly casual not-quite-relationship with a vain younger man for several years. Less is “an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books”. The younger man, who happens also to be the son of his arch enemy, announces his engagement to someone else.

While still not acknowledging to himself that he was in love all along and that his heart is cracked, if not quite broken, Less accepts a slew of writerly invitations that conveniently slot together to provide a round-the-world trip. Not only will he thus avoid the wedding, but sidestep the pain of turning 50 in company.

The various stages of this journey lend the novel its structure and, as is customary, provide both a parade of colourful characters and a voyage of self-discovery. They also neatly illustrate the scrabble-and-make-do that most freelance writers must resort to in order to survive, all those little jobs that make you feel like an author but that are not quite writing – “the crazy quilt of a writer’s life: warm enough, though it never quite covers the toes”.

Greer mercilessly skewers the insecurity of authors as well as the vanity of the literary industry’s self-absorption in the face of its irrelevance to most people’s lives. The stealthy genius of this novel is that it simultaneously tells the life story of a basically sweet man whom the industry has eaten alive. Less’s undoing, perhaps, is that he has been loved by a genius – he passed his youth as the lover of a celebrated poet – so has fallen into the habit of seeing himself as on the periphery of things. A twink -turned-daddy, he has yet to make the adjustment from kissed to kisser, and wreaks emotional havoc on anyone drawn in by his air of baffled innocence.

We first meet him in New York, where he has the humiliation of chairing a huge event for a wildly successful and wildly overrated science fiction writer. His next stop is Mexico, where he must take part in a panel discussion about his former lover’s genius. Then Italy, where an earlier novel of his, apparently brilliant in translation, is up for an obscure but well funded award: a sequence that catches particularly well the artificial camaraderie and false modesty of rivals thrown together for a prize. And so on to Germany, where he teaches a writing course entitled Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein. There he has a fling with a besotted business student and it is from the intimate details the narrator lets slip about the way Less kisses (“like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can only use the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you”) that the reader begins to suspect this story is being told not by some omniscient figure but by a character in it whom Less has underestimated. And then on to Paris, an ever less romantic journey across the desert in Morocco, a nightmarish food article he researches in Japan, and finally an Indian writing retreat. Here he plans to polish the rejected novel to perfection but, as the past reaches out to reclaim and challenge him, he is actually being prepared, we realise, finally to fall in love.

Novels about novelists are always a risk, but Less is about anyone who has allowed their calling to define them at the expense of their humanity. Writers may blush in the mirror it holds up to them, but many readers will find it as endearing as the very best of Armistead Maupin .

• Book of the day
• Pulitzer prize
• Awards and prizes

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Google Rating

Pulitzer Prize Winner

by Andrew Sean Greer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2017

Seasoned novelist Greer (The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, 2013, etc.) clearly knows whereof he speaks and has lived to...

Facing his erstwhile boyfriend’s wedding to another man, his 50th birthday, and his publisher’s rejection of his latest manuscript, a miserable midlist novelist heads for the airport.

When it comes to the literary canon, Arthur Less knows he is “as superfluous as the extra a in quaalude,” but he does get the odd invitation—to interview a more successful author, to receive an obscure prize, to tour French provincial libraries, that sort of thing. So rather than stay in San Francisco and be humiliated when his younger man of nine years' standing marries someone else (he can’t bear to attend, nor can he bear to stay home), he puts together a patchwork busman’s holiday that will take him to Paris, Morocco, Berlin, Southern India, and Japan. Of course, anything that can go wrong does—from falling out a window to having his favorite suit eaten by a stray dog, and as far as Less runs, he will not escape the fact that he really did lose the love of his life. Meanwhile, there’s no way to stop that dreaded birthday, which he sees as the definitive end of a rather extended youth: “It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.” Yet even this conversation occurs in the midst of a make-out session with a handsome Spanish stranger on a balcony at a party in Paris…hinting that there may be steaks and coffee on the other side. Upping the tension of this literary picaresque is the fact that the story is told by a mysterious narrator whose identity and role in Less’ future is not revealed until the final pages.

Pub Date: July 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-316-31612-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

LITERARY FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Andrew Sean Greer

BOOK REVIEW

by Andrew Sean Greer

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

By Andrew Sean Greer

'Less' by Andrew Sean Greer is an award-winning novel that has readers' reviews on every end of the spectrum. Find out the pros and cons of this modern satire in this review.

Article written by Onyekachi Osuji

B.A. in Public Administration and certified in Creative Writing (Fiction and Non-Fiction)

‘ Less ‘ by Andrew Sean Greer sparked controversies and mixed reactions when it won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Some reviewers were harsh in their conclusion that the book won the prestigious prize because of white male privilege, while other reviews believed that it was a well-deserved win because of the poetic flow of its narration.

But controversies aside, this article will be my personal opinion about the book, which I intend to be as objective as possible.

If there is one thing that makes ‘ Less ‘ by Andrew Sean Greer deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it won, it is the style. The novel is so lyrical. Literary devices flow so seamlessly that one may be deceived into thinking it was an effortless piece of writing.

‘ Less ‘ by Andrew Sean Greer is prose that reads beautifully like a poem and conjures dramatic scenes in a reader’s mind. There is no gainsaying the creativity showcased in the novel. It easily rates five out of five stars for me.

The plot is a lighthearted plot that should make one laugh all through. But I would not give full marks when it comes to the plot because of the way the writer tries to make trivial issues appear so serious, as if urging readers to feel sorry for the protagonist.

So, a lover you’ve been with is getting married to someone else? Yes, we understand that that hurts. But come on! Why are you making it look like a tragic natural disaster for the protagonist when he agreed with his lover that it was just casual sex all the while? And hey, Arthur Less, do you realize that you’re actually among the elite few? I mean, how many other heartbroken people get to hop on a plane and enjoy all-expense paid trips to several choice destinations around the world? As the character Zohra says, it’s hard to feel sorry for such a guy.

Structure of the Novel

The structure of ‘ Less ‘ is one of the things I love about the novel. First of all, it is not so voluminous, barely two hundred pages long, and can be read in a few hours. The length of a novel is one of the things that encourages people to pick it up to read, especially lazy readers or busy readers.

Another thing I love about the novel is the play on words in the title of each chapter. The novel has eight chapters, and each chapter’s title is derived from the protagonist’s name Arthur Less. So the first chapter is titled ”Less At First,” the last chapter is ”Less at Last,” and the chapters in between are titled Less with the derivative noun of the country Arthur Less is visiting at the time. For instance, “Less Mexican,” “Less German,” “Less Moroccan,” “Less Indian,” etc.

Apart from the protagonist, Arthur Less, the characters in this novel are not well developed. The author leaves a lot to be desired in his portrayal of the characters in ‘ Less .’ For instance, the character Robert is one with an interesting story of sexuality in ‘ Less .’ It would have made for a better read if he gave some details about how Robert got to be in a passionate heterosexual marriage at first and then come out as gay.

There are many scenes in the novel that are hilarious and will have readers laughing hard. The author’s ability to place the protagonist in awkward situations is an enjoyable read.

The only thing that prevents this novel from getting full marks for humor from every reader is that the humorous scenes are sometimes not depicted with clarity.

Unrealized Potentials

The most disappointing thing about ‘ Less ‘ by Andrew Sean Greer is that it takes readers to various countries around the world but ends up teaching readers so little about all those destinations. It did not showcase the exotic tourist attractions nor the educative everyday lives of people in these places.

A novel set in five continents, nine countries, and scores of cities ended up being so bland in terms of travel enlightenment. Talk about unrealized potential!

Review of Less

Book Title: Less

Book Description: 'Less' by Andrew Sean Greer combines lyrical prose and endearing humor in a critically acclaimed narrative.

Book Author: Andrew Sean Greer

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Little, Brown and Company

Date published: July 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-316-39413-9

Number Of Pages: 290

Less by Andrew Sean Greer Review: A Poetic Prose with Drama

The novel  Less  by Andrew Sean Greer is so wonderfully crafted. It won prestigious awards amidst mixed reactions and reviews. One of the best qualities of the novel is the writing style—it is lyrical, poetic, and enjoyable, and the humor is endearing too.  But on the flip side, one thing that detracts from the novel is the forced sadness and gloominess over trivial issues, whilst the protagonist and the narrator become annoying at many points in the novel.

• Poetic Narration
• Inspirational Dialogues
• Endearing Protagonist
• Poorly-Explored Settings
• Undeveloped Characters

Join Our Community for Free!

Exclusive to Members

Create Your Personal Profile

Engage in Forums

Join or Create Groups

Save your favorites, beta access.

About Onyekachi Osuji

Onyekachi was already an adult when she discovered the rich artistry in the storytelling craft of her people—the native Igbo tribe of Africa. This connection to her roots has inspired her to become a Literature enthusiast with an interest in the stories of Igbo origin and books from writers of diverse backgrounds. She writes stories of her own and works on Literary Analysis in various genres.

About the Book

Discover literature and connect with others just like yourself!

Start the Conversation. Join the Chat.

There was a problem reporting this post.

Block Member?

Please confirm you want to block this member.

You will no longer be able to:

• See blocked member's posts
• Mention this member in posts
• Invite this member to groups

Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.

Review: Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Less  by Andrew Sean Greer is an absolute delight. One of my favorite books of this year. It’s a must-read!

Sometimes you just know you’re going to love a book. Whether it’s a good vibe, positive critical buzz, what have you, it can be love at first sight. And  Less  even surpassed my expectations. There’s so much to love with Less  from its comedic nature, impressive writing and in the end, a story full of heart.

The story is about Arthur Less, he’s about to turn 50 and his ex-boyfriend is now engaged to someone else. While he’s published several books, none of them have caught on like he expected. Still, he receives a series of half-baked literary invitations from around the world and this becomes his perfect excuse for not attending his ex’s wedding. And thus, begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face.  What could possibly go wrong? For more on the synopsis, click here .

This book also is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, which is such an impressive feat for the author! And I believe it’s so well-deserved for many reasons. Let’s take a closer look at Less .

Unique narrative style

Less is written from the viewpoint of a narrator. While at first, it seems the narrator is just a third-party teller of Less’ story that we see in so many other novels, as the book goes on, it becomes apparent the narrator knows Less in some type of fashion. However, the identity is kept a mystery until the final pages.

The prose is comedic, I literally laughed out loud at certain passages. The narrative switches from satire to poignant observations at different times in the story. For instance, Less is about to turn 50 but in many ways still acts much younger. When talking about youth with his friend:

[blockquote align=”none” author=””]“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.” “Yes! It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.” [/blockquote]

Also, since the book travels to so many countries, there’s lots of colorful descriptions of each country. The countries receive their own chapters with plenty of content. Due to the writer traveling the world aspect, Less is compared to  Eat, Pray, Love but it’s a very different book. Still, though, if you enjoyed the travel in Eat, Pray Love , you’ll really like it in Less .

Keep in mind, while there is plenty of idyllic settings, much goes wrong with Less’ travels, which makes it all the more endearing.

Past relationships

As we get to know Less more, we learn he’s had two significant romantic relationships in his life. The first in his youth, with the much older Robert, a brilliant and award-winning poet. Their relationship was affection but riddled with complications, not least of all the age difference:

[blockquote align=”none” author=””]”When you’re fifty, I’ll be seventy-five. And then what will we do? Nothing to do but laugh about it. True for everything.” [/blockquote]

While he traveled and experienced so much with Robert, he also learned the drawbacks of living with a “genius.” For Arthur, it was like living alone where everything was sacrificed for Robert’s work. Still, even though it ended, Robert will always remain Less’ first love. And for a while, he thought his only love.

Then came along Freddy, the son of Arthur’s nemesis (which is an entertaining section). Arthur is about 15 years older than Freddy, the kind and handsome teacher. He believed it wasn’t love. Or was it? Because when Freddy said he met someone else, Arthur didn’t fight for him, which slowly becomes one of his biggest regrets.

This story takes you on a journey along with analyzing love, aging and last chance. Add it to your reading list immediately!

You may also like.

Booklover Book Reviews

Less (a Novel) by Andrew Sean Greer: Uncommon narrative

Less (a Novel) by Andrew Sean Greer is a life-affirming story about the writing life that I highly recommend to those with strong literary leanings. Read my review.

Less Book Synopsis

WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T RUN AWAY FROM YOUR PROBLEMS?

Arthur Less is a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the post from an ex-boyfriend of nine years who is engaged to someone else. Arthur can’t say yes – it would be too awkward; he can’t say no – it would look like defeat. So, he begins to accept the invitations on his desk to half-baked literary events around the world.

From France to India, Germany to Japan, Arthur almost falls in love, almost falls to his death, and puts miles between him and the plight he refuses to face. Less is a novel about mishaps, misunderstandings and the depths of the human heart.

( Hachette Australia )

Genre:  Literature, Drama, Humour, Romance, Adventure

Disclosure: If you click a link in this post we may earn a small commission to help offset our running costs.

BOOK REVIEW

Less…. don’t you just love the brevity yet gravitas of Andrew Sean Greer’s title.

Literary awards are rarely sufficient motivation for me to choose one book over another. The enjoyment of literature is notoriously subjective. But since this was already on my wishlist, its recent Pulitzer Prize firmed up my decision to purchase.

What immediately struck me about Less (a Novel) was its unusual narrative structure; predominantly first-person present tense (identity undisclosed) yet omnipresent.

From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Look at him: seated primly on the hotel lobby’s plush sofa, blue suit and white shirt, legs knee-crossed so that one polished loafer hangs free of its heel. The pose of a young man.

But on occasion more like third-person. It is both confounding and intriguing.

It is clear this narrator is a person in Arthur’s life (and thus a character mentioned within the novel), but it is not plausible this person is observing him in the present tense. The only way it works is if that narrator, at some later point having heard of Arthur’s travel tales, is imagining observing him in those situations. It took a little while for me to get my head around this; to stop fighting it.

The quirky wins

Eventually, the quirkiness and lyricism of the narrator’s observations and their ironic and conversational tone won me over.

Once in his twenties, a poet he had been talking with extinguished her cigarette in a potted plant and said, “You’re like a person without skin.” A poet had said this. One who made her living flaying herself alive in public had said the he , tall and young and hopeful Arthur Less, was  without skin . But it was true.

I found myself highlighting countless passages, admiring the subtle yet potent irony woven into this narrative’s fabric.

There are always a few drops left in the bottle of indignity.

Ron Charles of The Washington Post called Less   ‘the funniest novel of the year’ .

With regards to its subject matter, this novel is effectively preaching to the converted. Less is about writers, writing and the broader challenges of a career and life involving creative personas. Literary references abound.

“He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.

While Arthur’s rudderlessness limits the extent one invests in his plight, his eclectic travel experiences and the intrigue surrounding the narrator’s identity make for compelling reading. Recent events have also injected an additional, delightful stroke of serendipity to this tale.

But it is the more serious emotional and philosophical depths plumbed by Greer’s narrator, combined with his lead character’s absence of expectation, that ultimately make this novel life-affirming.

Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is a title I highly recommend, but only to those with strong literary leanings.

BOOK RATING:  The Story 4 / 5 ; The Writing 4.5 / 5  — Overall 4.25

Get your copy of Less from:

Bookshop US Amazon Booktopia AU

Will there be a Less book sequel?

Yes, a sequel has been published, titled Less is Lost .

If you like the sound of Less , you may also enjoy: Hotel Silence by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir  /  The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman  /   A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman  /   A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson  /  Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar

About the Auther, Andrew Sean Greer

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of five works of fiction, including The Confessions of Max Tivoli , which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He won the California Book Award, New York Public Library Young Lions Award and O Henry Award for short fiction. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco. He has travelled to all of the locations in this novel, but he is only big in Italy.

Check out Andrew Sean Greer’s website and connect with him on Twitter .

Related reading:

• Finally, a comic novel gets a Pulitzer Prize. It’s about time – Washington Post
• Pulitzer Prize Winner Andrew Sean Greer Shares How He Wrote an Award-Winning Novel – Esquire

Other Less reviews

“This is a very funny and occasionally wise book.” –  Kirkus Reviews

“Greer mercilessly skewers the insecurity of authors as well as the vanity of the literary industry’s self-absorption in the face of its irrelevance to most people’s lives. The stealthy genius of this novel is that it simultaneously tells the life story of a basically sweet man whom the industry has eaten alive… Novels about novelists are always a risk, but Less is about anyone who has allowed their calling to define them at the expense of their humanity.” –  The Guardian

“Arthur’s wanderings as he makes his way from disaster to disaster are hilariously, brilliantly harrowing. But laughter is only a part of the joy of reading this book. Greer writes sentences of arresting lyricism and beauty.” – NYTimes

“While the book is intended to be funny, at times it feels like a middle-aged man’s  A Series of Unfortunate Events .” – KenyonReview

“A charming novel about a middle-aged odyssey taken by the most amiable of heroes” – The Independent

” Wise, generous of spirit and beautifully written… Arthur Less may be in the throes of a midlife crisis, but his heart-warming adventures leave one longing for more. ” – The Spectator

The Pulitzer judges and I do not always agree though…. For example, see my review of the much-lauded Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout .

Share this:

A booklover with diverse reading interests, who has been reviewing books and sharing her views and opinions on this website and others since 2009.

• Member Login
• Library Patron Login

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR

FREE NEWSLETTERS

Search: Title Author Article Search String:

BookBrowse Reviews Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

by Andrew Sean Greer

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Literary Fiction
• Contemporary
• Humor & Satire
• Mid-Life Onwards

Rate this book

About this Book

• Reading Guide

Book Awards

• Media Reviews
• Reader Reviews

A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, and a bittersweet romance of chances lost.

Arthur Less, the main character of Andrew Sean Greer's delightful new comic novel, Less , is a forty-nine year old gay man. He is a writer, and a moderately successful one, but when his story opens, Arthur is running away. To be precise, he is running away from the wedding of his former lover, Freddy. Rather than attend this event, Arthur has seized on an array of invitations to small-time literary jobs – interviewing another author, attending an awards ceremony, teaching a creative class for a number of weeks, even being a food critic – that will take him across the US and the world. Certainly hapless, at times helpless, but consistently lovable, Arthur Less's global misadventures are a pleasure to read. Less opens with him waiting in a hotel lobby prior to interviewing a highly successful writer in New York. That he is not wearing a watch, that he is sitting beneath a broken clock so he has no idea what time it is, that he is waiting to be collected by someone who thinks he is female: these things set the comic tone for the story that unfolds. But for Arthur Less, none of these matters is of consequence. What matters is that he is on the first leg of a journey to as far away from San Francisco as possible — a journey that will take him to Mexico City, Turin, Berlin, Morocco, India and Japan. Several factors contribute to the success of Less . First, there is Andrew Sean Greer's gift of description. At each of Arthur Less's stopping points, Greer captures place and people vividly and succinctly. In a Mexican market there are "grey octopuses coiled in ampersands" and "bitter chocolates… piled in ziggurats beside a basket of Aztec whisks." In Berlin, Less admires "the glorious junkyard of the city" and a different kind of market selling "cheap socks, stolen bicycles and plastic lamps." From the sandstorms of Morocco to the formal gardens of Japan, Less provides a rich and enticing travelogue. Then there is Arthur Less, a man made for comic misadventure. In Berlin, for example, he has agreed to teach a five-week course "on a subject of Mr. Less's choosing." He is happy to do so, particularly because he believes he is fluent in German. He is not. Skewering literary jealousies, the vagaries of literary prizes and most brilliantly, creative writing classes, Greer weaves a humorous voyage of adventure and mishap with many laugh-out-loud moments. Less, a humble innocent abroad, is an aptly named and attractive character. Perhaps because of his long-term prior relationship with an older, Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Less believes he lives up to his name. He is a lesser man, the last man to expect to win a literary award, the kind of man who locks himself out of hotel rooms and loses his suitcases. But he also proves to be a man who is caring, selfless, open and young at heart. The people he meets, warm to him. He is far more attractive than he believes himself to be, a Peter Pan figure in a light blue suit, on a voyage of self-discovery. Less is also a love story with many bittersweet moments. Thoughts of Freddy's marriage haunt Arthur, even as he takes a lover in Berlin and comes up with a plan to re-write his new novel, after his publisher rejects it. As he completes his global journey and comes to terms with "the tragi-comic business of being alive" his story wraps up with a warm-hearted and fitting conclusion. Overall, this is a charming tale, very well told.

• "Beyond the Book" articles
• Free books to read and review (US only)
• Find books by time period, setting & theme
• Read-alike suggestions by book and author
• Book club discussions
• and much more!
• Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
• More about membership!

Beyond the Book:    My Favorite Gay Characters in Literature

Read-alikes.

• Genres & Themes

If you liked Less, try these:

Heart of Junk

by Luke Geddes

Published 2021

About this book

A hilarious debut novel about an eclectic group of merchants at a Kansas antique mall who become implicated in the kidnapping of a local beauty pageant star.

George and Lizzie

by Nancy Pearl

Published 2018

From "America's librarian" and NPR books commentator Nancy Pearl comes an emotionally riveting debut novel about an unlikely marriage at a crossroads.

Support BookBrowse

Join our inner reading circle, go ad-free and get way more!

Find out more

BookBrowse Book Club

Members Recommend

Daughters of Shandong by Eve J. Chung

Eve J. Chung's debut novel recounts a family's flight to Taiwan during China's Communist revolution.

The Stolen Child by Ann Hood

An unlikely duo ventures through France and Italy to solve the mystery of a child’s fate.

Who Said...

Second hand books are wild books...

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Solve this clue:

and be entered to win..

Your guide to exceptional           books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Embed our reviews widget for this book

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

May 6 – May 10, 2024

• In praise of the student journalists covering university protests
• Adania Shibli on book bans and the destruction of Palestinian literature
• “Every love poem is a Palestine poem, and every Palestine poem is a love poem.” Mandy Shunnarah on Mahmoud Darwish and writing Palestinian poetry .

Find anything you save across the site in your account

How “Less Is Lost” Finds Its Footing

By Alexandra Schwartz

Pity the plight of the gay white man. Not as notorious as his heterosexual counterpart, more socially privileged than his queer peers, he has been drained of popular sympathy by virtue of his cultural success. Take the recent film “Fire Island,” Joel Kim Booster’s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice”: while the Bennet sisters are transformed into a gaggle of gay friends of color (mostly), the role of the villainous Mr. Wickham is given to Dex, a white seducer who deploys his Tom of Finland physique and sterling Instagram politics to prey upon his dazzled prospects. But a gay white guy as a marginalized hero, an underdog whose private tragedies we mourn? That’s a harder sell.

Or so Arthur Less, the protagonist of “ Less ,” Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 novel, is forced to conclude. Less, like Greer, is a middle-aged gay white novelist; his latest manuscript, “Swift,” is a sombre tale of—what else?—a middle-aged gay white man who wanders around San Francisco à la Leopold Bloom in Dublin, suffering various setbacks and contemplating his regrets. Less is shocked when his publisher rejects it outright. “It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that,” a lesbian friend explains. The book, as even Less comes to see, has been artistically petrified by his character’s self-pity, that “gorgon of Caucasian male ego.” It’s as good as dead.

Then Less has an idea. What if he rewrote his tragedy as a farce? Inspiration flows: “With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining.” Laughter suddenly replaces sighs and tears, and a holy fool steps in for a puffed-up hero.

Less’s strategy is also the strategy of “Less.” The novel maintains a delicious comic buoyancy as it follows the antics of its Buster Keatonish protagonist , buffeting him with one obstacle after another only to have him land, each time, on his feet. Dramatic irony usually casts readers as Cassandras: we watch with dread as unsuspecting characters meet with disaster. But what makes Less so endearing is his sincere ignorance of his good luck. Though Less himself is writing a “gay ‘Ulysses,’ ” the scope of his own journeys is more Homeric than Joycean; he leaves his home in San Francisco to travel to Mexico, then Italy, Germany, France, Morocco, India, and Japan, funding his exploits with teaching gigs, magazine assignments, and the like. The cause of all this wandering is Less’s desire to escape the impending wedding of his former lover Freddy Pelu, an English teacher some fifteen years his junior, whom Less, whether in the spirit of unpossessive generosity (as he wants to believe) or for fear of rejection (the truth), unwisely let get away. But Freddy is closer at hand than Less suspects: he’s the book’s affectionate, rueful narrator. How can he know what Less is doing, never mind thinking and feeling, from the other side of the world? He can’t, of course, and that imaginative leap is part of the book’s charm, the key to its romantic optimism. Telling Less’s story is Freddy’s way of keeping watch over him. You cheer for the couple’s reunion, though hapless Less proves such an enjoyable travelling companion that it’s bittersweet to bid him goodbye as he returns to California to find Freddy waiting for him with open arms.

Apparently, Greer felt the same way, because he has brought Less back, in “ Less Is Lost ” (Little, Brown), a sequel that picks up the plot nine months later. Freddy has moved into Less’s little house, called the Shack, and wants to get married. Less isn’t so sure. “This is the story of a crisis in our lives,” Freddy, enlisted again as the omniscient narrator, reports. Another one, so soon?

As the novel begins, it is Freddy who is far from home, on a sabbatical in Maine to study “narrative form.” On the verge of flying east to join him, Less learns that his first great love, the renowned poet Robert Brownburn, has died. The two men met on a San Francisco beach when Less was a svelte twenty-one and Robert was more than two decades older and married (to a woman—this was 1987). In fact, it is Robert’s ex-wife, Marian, who gives Less the bad news. And there’s more. The Shack belonged to Robert; when Robert left Less, after fifteen years together, he left him the house, too. Now Marian tells Less that he owes ten years of back rent. If he doesn’t come up with the money in a month, he and Freddy are out.

Less assures Freddy that he has a plan. He’s been asked to write a magazine profile of a best-selling science-fiction writer, H. H. H. Mandern, and is serving on the committee for a fancy literary prize, which entails some kind of honorarium. Also, a Louisiana-based drama troupe is offering Less an improbably fat sum to adapt one of his short stories for the stage and has invited him to tag along on its tour. Freddy manages to douse his skepticism in the name of love, but this reader had a harder time. San Francisco is among the most expensive rental markets in the country; the man needs a MacArthur grant, not a magazine assignment. In any case, the money is merely a pretext for Greer to send Less on another roving adventure, this one across the continental United States, beginning in Palm Springs, where he meets up with the gruff, shambolic Mandern—a George R. R. Martin type who enlists Less to chauffeur him and his pug across the Southwest in an old camper van—and ending in Delaware, Less’s home state. The novel advances by way of a series of road-trip encounters with characters who are mostly also “characters,” like Arathusa, who leads an off-the-grid Arizona commune and whose personal motto is “Know no no ,” and Miss Dorothy Howe-Gorbaty, the head of the theatre troupe, a steel magnolia with a penchant for dancing the Carolina shag. Less, who gets custody of the van, and the dog, after Mandern makes his exit, spends a great deal of time in R.V. parks—where he nervously tries to camouflage his sexuality by purchasing “a red bandanna, wraparound sunglasses, a HOOT ’N’ HOLLER T-shirt, flip-flops, a baseball cap, a cowboy hat, a bolo tie, and six miniature American flags”—and in beer bars, including one in Alabama where a patron surprises him by asking, “thoughtfully,” what it’s like to be gay. So much for disguises.

Homophobia isn’t a serious risk in the benign world of the “Less” books. The real threat comes in the form of the accusation—lobbed, inevitably, by a fellow middle-aged white gay male writer—that Less is a “bad gay,” too conciliatory to hetero sensibilities in his prose. The charge stings because Less fears that it may be true, and not just on the page. “When he moved to New York after college, in the eighties,” Freddy tells us, “Arthur Less certainly tried his hardest to be gay”:

He joined a gym that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a political party that turned out to believe a conspiracy theory about government health clinics. He joined a German-language society that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a book group that turned out to be only for a political party. He joined a role-playing game club that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a sex dungeon that turned out to be a government health clinic. It was all so confusing.

Link copied

This deadpan passage is typical of Greer’s best comic writing, with its exquisite attention to rhythm, repetition, and timing, the bright sentences tossed up like juggling balls to be caught in dazzling rotation.

Sexuality is one kind of performance. Nationality is another. Less’s countrymen often mistake him for a foreigner, a fair confusion when it comes to a member of that dreaded coastal caste, the publishing world, “which, like an orbiting space station, looks upon the rest of America without ever interacting with it.” To a globe-trotting “Minor American Novelist,” nowhere could be more exotic than America itself. Greer, a resident of San Francisco and Milan—the one in Italy, not to be confused with those in Georgia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, New Mexico, or New York—is gamely implicating himself. His acknowledgments include a note of thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation “for the grant that allowed for all the RV rentals.” He, too, has charted a course across the country’s great middle, and his findings, or Less’s, are often lovely. “You would think nothing would be as well oiled as the derricks pumping along the Mississippi River. And yet they squeak all night,” one perfect postcard of a paragraph reads.

Where Greer runs into trouble is in his attempt to use Less’s trip to gesture at the state of the Union writ large, an ambition that he signals early. At a gathering following Robert’s funeral, a smug Czech editor accuses Less of provincialism. Has he seen anything of his country beyond “New York, Boston, San Francisco?” And, speaking of his country, has he ever so much as wondered “if it’s wrong? The whole idea?” Less must admit that “the notion has never occurred to him.” Critiquing the American experiment has become something of a trope in the current political climate, but, though Greer’s novel is set in the approximate present, his America is a land curiously devoid of politics. Less manages to drive three thousand miles without coming across so much as a single MAGA hat; there seems to have been no major public-health crisis since AIDS .

“The American berserk,” as Philip Roth called the nation’s general resting state, has never been berserker. Other American satirists—Paul Beatty comes immediately to mind—have sparked to the country’s extremity. Greer, though, has a gentler sensibility. He wants to see the best in people, and that rare instinct puts him in a bind. How to confront the madness, let alone the viciousness, the violence, the cruelty, of the moment while maintaining the kind of comic equipoise that he prizes?

One answer is to spike the humor with harsher stuff. Freddy, so genially tolerant of his lover’s foibles in “Less,” takes on an edge in “Less Is Lost.” A self-described “pasticcio” of “Italian, Spanish, and Mexican heritages,” he is now dealt the thankless task of chiding Less for his white-male myopia. When Less is left stupefied after unknowingly sampling some hallucinogenic blueberries foisted on him by a trio of German tourists, Freddy reflects, “The world is so constructed that men like you will always end up safe. Almost always.” A few pages later, when Less finds himself riding a donkey down a ravine on Navajo land: “I hope Arthur Less realizes he knows nothing, nothing at all, about the people who once lived here, or those who live here now.” These appliqué indictments have the awkward feel of authorial preëmption; it’s as if Greer felt the need to make a show of taking his character to task for being categorically “problematic.” Perhaps to compensate, he saddles Less with emotional baggage (a dead mother, a long-absent father) that hints at painful depths without really creating them. These are “Swift”-ian touches, and they work no better in Greer’s novel than they evidently did in Less’s.

Freddy, though, isn’t just exasperated by Less. He’s jealous, too, of Less’s youthful love for Robert, and worries that he’ll never be able to take his predecessor’s place. That rawer, truer vein of feeling gives the novel back its heart. If “Less Is Lost” is, well, a lesser work than “Less,” there’s something sincerely winning in Greer’s undogmatic brand of small-c conservatism. Like Freddy, Greer is a believer: in love and, even more old-fashioned, in marriage. That ancient, flawed, astoundingly persistent institution gives Greer his strongest metaphor for the country’s predicament:

America, how’s your marriage? Your two-hundred-fifty-year-old promise to stay together in sickness and in health? First thirteen states, then more and more, until fifty of you had taken the vow. Like so many marriages, I know, it was not for love; I know it was for tax reasons, but soon you all found yourself financially entwined, with shared debts and land purchases and grandiose visions of the future, yet somehow, from the beginning, essentially at odds. Ancient grudges. That split you had—that still stings, doesn’t it? Who betrayed whom, in the end? I hear you tried getting sober. That didn’t last, did it?

What you’re hearing, mixed in with the humor, is melancholy. “If it can’t work for you, can it work for any of us?” Freddy asks. He’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Traditional comedy culminates in a wedding, traditional tragedy in death. We can’t presume to know how the American story, that insane and unprecedented jumble of genres, will end, but Less and Freddy’s story is another matter. No one’s private world is shielded from national storms, but often enough the sun does shine there. We need some novels to remind us of that, and this is one. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

The day the dinosaurs died .

What if you started itching— and couldn’t stop ?

How a notorious gangster was exposed by his own sister .

Woodstock was overrated .

Diana Nyad’s hundred-and-eleven-mile swim .

Photo Booth: Deana Lawson’s hyper-staged portraits of Black love .

Fiction by Roald Dahl: “The Landlady”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Inkoo Kang

By Helen Shaw

By Jennifer Wilson

By Maggie Doherty

Review of LESS, A NOVEL

Less, a Novel, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize Authored by Andrew Sean Greer Reviewed by James Victor Jordan

A Magniloquent Spoony

         When we meet Arthur Less, the protagonist in Andrew Sean Greer’s fifth novel, he is almost fifty. He is a mid-list author waiting to hear word from his publisher—hopefully word of a significant advance for his latest novel Swift. Soon after beginning the story, we learn during a flashback that “Arthur Less did not publish until he was in his thirties. By then, he had lived with the famous poet Robert Brownburn.”  Irony of ironies, Brownburn, a member of the by-then-almost-extinct collective of Russian River artists, is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. This casts a shadow over Arthur as an inescapable cloak of another person’s fame. It defines Arthur to as great an extent as it defines Bwornburn.  So was the 2018-Pulitzer-Prize committee having a bit of fun awarding its annual literature prize to a novel extolling a fictive-Pulitzer-Prize winner?  Perhaps.  But even those who think that the award should have gone to Lincoln in the Bardo would have to admit that Less unquestionably was a worthy winner of the award. It is hilarious, heartwarming, poignant, illuminating, philosophical: a top-tier latter-day romantic comedy.

         Arthur Less’s first novel, Kalipso , was his most successful but only a “moderate success.” When none other than the esteemed critic Richard Champion reviews Kalipso for The New York Times, Brownburn says, “it was a good review.” “But every author can taste the poison another has slipped into the punch, and Champion ended by calling the author himself a ‘magniloquent [meaning grandiose or ostentatious] spoony’ [meaning unduly emotional or sentimental].”  Arthur wonders if Champion is “sending a message to the enemy.” Brownburn affirms, telling Arthur “he’s just calling you a faggot,” which is the world of this novel, as it should be in life, is not an insult.  Nonetheless, from then on Arthur Less wears the sobriquet “magniloquent spoony” as a badge of insecurity. Every badge has two sides.  The opposite side of Arthur Less’s badge of fear is, as he’s told by his current lover, Freddy Pelu, bravery. This is but a brief glimpse of the richness and delicious complexity of character Greer brings to the page.

         Life quickly goes south for Arthur Less in the first chapter.  Freddy Pelu leaves him to marry another, Arthur is invited to the wedding and must find a reasonable explanation for declining the invitation, and Swift is declined by Arthur’s publisher of almost twenty years. Not sent back for a rewrite. Not given any feedback or criticism, just flat-out rejected.  Hence it is with this baggage, with this sorrow, that Arthur begins a trip around the world he’s arranged as his excuse to avoid Freddy Pelu’s wedding with dignity.  He’ll travel to New York where wearing a cosmonaut’s helmet before a large crowd he’ll interview the popular science fiction writer H. H. H. Mandern, to Mexico where he’ll attend a literary convocation celebrating the poetry of the too-infirm to travel Robert Bownburn, to Italy where he will attend an awards ceremony where the recently translated-into-Italian Kalipso is a contestant, to Germany where he will lecture, to  the Sahara where he will vacation with old friends, to India where he plans to write, revising Swift, and to Japan where he will write a review of Japanese cuisine.  The memories and the emotions Arthur experiences during his preignitions are journeys in their own right.  And along the way we see Arthur afraid and intrepid.

         There are aspects of this novel I would describe as genius.  Less, except at times in the flashbacks, is written in first person present tense but almost as if it were written in close third person—the first-person narrator can tell us the thoughts, the feelings of Arthur Less.  But who is this omniscient first-person narrator? There are hints but not a full reveal until the end.  Then there is the philosophy. In one instance Brownburn tells Arthur that when you meet someone, a time machine is created.  Later you can go back in time with your memories to the first time you met the person.  But you cannot really know a person from a time before you met him.  You can surmise, believe what you’re told or what you read, but that is not a substitute for knowing the person.

         For these reasons I award Less a most-praiseworthy review.    

This Post Has 4 Comments

Yes, Less is a very clever novel, and this is a terrific summary and insightful review!

Thank you Jacob for the compliment and the feedback.

I just reread your review of ‘Less’ since it came up in last night’s conversation and I didn’t think that it received its due. I so appreciate your reminding me why I enjoyed it so much. Maybe it seems ‘less than’ because there is an underlying sweetness to it, which is affirming – much needed and appreciated these days.

Enjoyed our discussion of ‘American Pastoral’ !

Thank you Barbara. We (Kathy who said she’d co-author) and I are hard at work on our review of American Pastoral. Each of the reviews I’ve found has been written by a person with great knowledge of and familiarity with Roth’s work. I suppose there is benefit in reading a review from reviewers who haven’t read any of his other books yet.

When I was first reading LESS I too wondered why it was Pulitzer Prize worthy. But it was so clever, so well written, and as you observe so sweet and humane, that I was in the camp of the Pulitzer judges.

Thanks for contributing here. Best, James

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

• Post published: February 13, 2019
• Post category: Books, Films & Music
• Post comments: 4 Comments

You Might Also Like

Review of YES, YES CHERRIES By Mary Otis

Review of THE COLOR OF FEAR By Wendy Wanner

THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus Reviewed by James Victor Jordan

Review of JONI PAREDES by Christopher Meeks

THE RELUCTANT MESSENGER RETURNS by Candice M. Sanderson Review to Come!

An homage to Anne Rudloe

Uncomfortable Minds by Larry Sorkin, Reviewed by James Victor Jordan

Review of BECOMING by Michelle Obama

T.C. Boyle at the 2019 LA Times Book Fest

Review of THE BLACK SEMINOLES

Let’s All Go To Mooseville with Guest Author and Resident, Moose

THE ANNOTATED BIG SLEEP by Raymond Chandler Reviewed by James Victor Jordan

” What A Great Movie”, by Alan Swyer

Review of LINCOLN IN THE BARDO

Fright Night Virtual Event

“Red Betty” by Hot Tamale

APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA By John O’Hara

My Review of OUTSIDE LOOKING IN By T.C. Boyle

Review of AMERICAN PASTORAL Authored by Philip Roth – 5 Stars

“Coronaville” By Craig Reeder of Hot Tamale

Review of MONTHS AND SEASONS by Christopher Meeks

Review of CANVAS OF MY SOUL: THE HUES OF MY PALETTE By Anahit Arustamyan

Review of A TWIST OF KARMA by Wendy Wanner.

LOSING THE NOBEL PRIZE by Brian G. Keating

IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS Authored by Daniyal Mueenuddin Reviewed by Hassan Riaz, M.D.

Review of JERRY WITH A TWIST: A STORY OF REDEMPTION by Christopher Meeks

My Lymphoma Year: A Memoir and a Guide by Joel Wapnick, Reviewed by James Victor Jordan

Review of BLACK HOLES AND TIME WARPS: EINSTEIN’S OUTRAGEOUS LEGACY By Kip S. Thorne

THE NOTCH by Tom Holland, Reviewed by James Victor Jordan

THE DISPOSSESSED: AN AMBIGUOUS UTOPIA by Ursula K. Le Guin, Reviewed by James Victor Jordan

Child of Light by Madison Smartt Bell Reviewed by James Victor Jordan

“The Puppy Song” at Hanoi Summit?

Review by Chris Miller of Kirkus Reviews’ Review of “Another Bullshit Night in Suck City” by Nick Flynn

This is Happiness by Niall Williams Reviewed by James V. Jordan

THE BENEFITS OF BREATHING, by Christopher Meeks–Reviewed by James Victor Jordan

“I’ll Love You Anyway” by Hot Tamale

THE VIEW NORTH FROM LIBERAL CEMETERY by Joel Wapnick, Reviewed By James Victor Jordan

The Reluctant Messenger Returns by Candice M. Sanderson Reviewed by James V. Jordan

LAST STORIES By William Trevor

A DEATH IN KITCHAWANK By T.C. Boyle

Meet Tobias Wolff and Friends

• Getting Started
• Start a Book Club
• Book Club Ideas/Help▼
• Our Featured Clubs ▼
• Popular Books
• Book Reviews
• Reading Guides
• Blog Home ▼
• Find a Recipe
• About LitCourse
• Course Catalog

Less (Greer)

Less   Andrew Sean Greer, 2017 Little, Brown and Co. 272 pp. ISBN-13: 978 0316316125 Summary Winner, 2018 Pulitzer Prize Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes — it would be too awkward — and you can't say no — it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? ANSWER: You accept them all. What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last. Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story. A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author the New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy. ( From the publisher .)

• Next >>

LitLovers © 2024

Advertisement

Supported by

Ready for More of ‘Less’? Andrew Sean Greer’s Hapless Hero Is Back.

In “Less Is Lost,” the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic novel, the author’s writer protagonist, now over 50 and in need of cash, takes to the road once again.

• Share full article

By Matthew Schneier

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

LESS IS LOST, by Andrew Sean Greer

In Andrew Sean Greer’s 2017 novel “ Less ,” our titular hero — a gay novelist of a certain age, with a handsome face, thinning hair and a roughly equal balance of success and obscurity — goes careering around the world, on the run from heartbreak and headfirst into the undiscovered country of gay middle age. (“Less’s generation often feels like the first to explore the land beyond 50,” Greer wrote. “How are they meant to do it?”) It could have been dour or glum, but Greer played it for laughs instead. “Less” is one of those literary names that tell you, if not quite everything you need to know, at least enough to go on. Like Updike’s “Rabbit,” it hops to suggest. Arthur Less is lovable but fallible, not the worst but not the best. He’s better described not by his attributes but by their absence — one observer calls him “reckless,” but isn’t it really more like “hapless”? He is, in the words of his partner, “one for whom ordering a deli sandwich and wrestling an alligator held equal levels of terror.” It’s tempting to call him luckless, but the sweet bathos of his bumbling quest — and the flashes of wit and poetry with which Greer animated it — won his author a Pulitzer Prize . Greer, a gay novelist of a certain age with a roughly equal balance of success and obscurity , was suddenly a comic novelist of note. Why trifle with a winning formula? For his follow-up this month, here comes — and who could blame him? — more of Less.

In “Less Is Lost,” Arthur is back, now on the north side of 50, happily ensconced with his younger partner, Freddy. A youthful foil in the first novel, Freddy is now “approaching 40, the age at which the charming eccentricities of one’s 20s (sleeping in a silk bonnet to save my curls and wearing rabbit-eared slippers) become the zaniness of middle age,” the distance between him and Less closing if not closed. “Less” concerned itself with the possibility of durable love and rapprochement — Less’s international expedition was inspired by both his onrushing 50th birthday and Freddy’s wedding to someone else after nine years of dallying with Arthur — but “Less Is Lost” picks up a little while later, with Freddy’s marriage dissolved and the two now shacked up, in a little house they call “the Shack,” having enjoyed “nine months of unmarital bliss.” “Who wants a middle-aged gay white novelist nobody’s ever heard of?” Less wonders with characteristic unplomb. “Me,” Freddy says. “I do.”

But happiness doesn’t drive comedy, and Greer seems unsure what to do with Less content. Send in the clouds. Less’s first love, the august older poet Robert Brownburn, dies, leaving him not the house (Brownburn is the Shack’s legal owner), but the stack of rent bills Less has apparently never bothered to pay. Comfortable chaos is restored. Less, a ditherer in monetary matters, must suddenly raise 10 years’ worth of rent or lose his love nest. So, as in “Less,” in which he accepted every invitation that came his way in order to circle the world, here he takes every paying gig, wherever it may lead. An ordinary writer might work from his garret. Less, once again, takes to the road.

Thus do the gears of the picaresque begin to turn. Less accepts an assignment to profile a best-selling sci-fi novelist (H.H.H. Mandern, a minor character in the first novel), and finds himself chauffeuring him and a pug called Dolly on a road trip through the American Southwest in an aging camper van called Rosina. Mandern is a kook and probably a hack, but inconveniences and contrivances power the plot: Less, effectively his prisoner, must both deliver him to his daughter in Arizona to make amends, and answer questions about his own troubled family history as they go. Less’s father, who abandoned his children in their youth, is now dying, and settling family scores turns out to be one of the hero’s quests Less must dispatch along the way. Of these, there are many: When a mission is completed, or the going slows, a deus ex machina, Less’s literary agent, rings up with a new job.

As Less wends from California to Arizona through Texas to Georgia and then up the Eastern Seaboard, an American odyssey to complement his previous, global jaunt, “Lost” begins to feel more like found — as in: the earlier book, turned up like an old favorite on the bookshelf of a much-visited inn. For its many admirers, that may be selling point enough. But it’s the rare sequel that outstrips its original, and it’s hard not to feel that “Less Is Lost,” like Rosina, is running on fumes. Greer leans harder into caricature this time around, more yokel than local. Some jokes, like Less’s imperfect German, are repeated wholesale. (He certainly lucks into having to use it often enough.) There are high jinks and potboiling fifth-act surprises, theater troupers and clothing-optional communards, set pieces twinkling in the Lessian light of a “beaver moon.”

And yet through it all, “Less Is Lost” is enlivened by sentence-level loveliness, en route to a warm humanism that veers toward the maudlin but mostly doesn’t off-road into it. “What do we want from the past, anyway?” Freddy wonders late in the book. “For it to trifle with us no longer? For it to cease its surprises, its stirrings, its stings, for it to be fixed forever — for it to die? But the past is like those jellyfish that, when harmed, coil into themselves and revert to immature blobs from which they begin new lives and become, in simple terms, immortal. What can we do but look away from such painful miracles?”

Writing is one such painful miracle. Less at his desk is a “demon staring back at me with red-rimmed eyes and growling,” the room destroyed, a “hellscape” to be taken in with horror. The writer’s life is the novel’s quiet subject. Less has given Greer fertile ground, and he reaps what he’s sown. A mixed blessing, it seems. For all the fixation on Less, it is actually Freddy who is our narrator and guide, Freddy whose voice we actually hear. “What was it like for whalers’ wives and widows?” he asks late in the saga, having made his own cross-country flight to Maine to get away and — though who, having lived with a writer, would have the appetite for it? — to write himself. “Years away at sea, husbands coming back — if they came back — having seen things you cannot imagine, having wrestled with the unknown and, somehow, won? All this with barely enough money made to cover the debt accrued? I imagine it was like being married to a novelist.”

Matthew Schneier is a features writer for New York magazine and The Cut .

LESS IS LOST | By Andrew Sean Greer | 257 pp. | Little, Brown & Company | $29

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

The complicated, generous life  of Paul Auster, who died on April 30 , yielded a body of work of staggering scope and variety .

“Real Americans,” a new novel by Rachel Khong , follows three generations of Chinese Americans as they all fight for self-determination in their own way .

“The Chocolate War,” published 50 years ago, became one of the most challenged books in the United States. Its author, Robert Cormier, spent years fighting attempts to ban it .

Joan Didion’s distinctive prose and sharp eye were tuned to an outsider’s frequency, telling us about ourselves in essays that are almost reflexively skeptical. Here are her essential works .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

• LGBTQ+ Books
• Literature & Fiction

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Follow the author

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Novel (The Arthur Less Books, 1) Paperback – Special Edition, August 2, 2022

• Book 1 of 2 The Arthur Less Books
• Print length 272 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Back Bay Books
• Publication date August 2, 2022
• ISBN-10 0316479284
• ISBN-13 978-0316479288
• See all details

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Back Bay Books; Special Edition (August 2, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316479284
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316479288
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.11 pounds

Videos for this product

Click to play video

Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Novel

Amazon Videos

About the author

Andrew sean greer.

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of seven works of fiction, including The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O Henry award for short fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. His novel Less won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it's follow-up, Less Is Lost, is out Sept 2022. Greer lives in San Francisco and Milan.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Arthur Less #2

Less is lost, andrew sean greer.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 20, 2022

About the author

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think? Rate this book Write a Review

Friends & Following

Community reviews.

How wonderful to believe in a universe that holds, for you, a special plan! Only the very young, Less observes, could think so. Only those still at the beginning of this novel would trust the Author knows what He is doing. While Less, being an author himself, knows that no authors know what they are doing. That is what the drink and drugs and madness are about (we have two authors in a van as evidence). And, having seen twice as much of life as anyone here, he knows the Author has long ago lost the plot.

"The landscape is reversed; the desert is now in the sky, streaked with heliotrope and tawny gold as if along the crests of sand dunes, and below it spreads a dark galaxy of spiny plants: the Joshua trees. They lie out to the horizon in clumps, Holy Rollers at a revival, lifting their heavy arms. How long has this been going on? For all time? Why did no one tell him? The stars are being extinguished one by one, as if by a lamplighter, as the horizon begins to whiten in expectation. And he notices, out there among the Joshua trees, almost of them, silhouetted against the sky, the shape of an old man in a robe regarding the sunrise. His little dog begins to bay. To tell the truth, America looks fine from here." "One leads to the Grand Canyon, which Less visited once on a chance southwest trip in his early forties. He arrived before dawn and hiked out onto a promontory--utterly alone--to watch one of the wonders of America. Each level of the canyon began to be slowly colored, as by a paint-by-numbers virtuoso, and quickly became saturated in sepias, umbers, buffs, fawns, coppers, and bronzes. The whole thing seemed queerly flat. He felt like he was looking at a mural in a high-school gymnasium."

Join the discussion

Can't find what you're looking for.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Book Reviews

• LISTEN & FOLLOW
• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Amazon Music

Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free feed.

'Less' offers more in Andrew Sean Greer's follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning novel

Maureen Corrigan

Less is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer Little, Brown hide caption

Why do we underrate comedy when we need it so badly? When Andrew Sean Greer's novel Less won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 there was a dismissive shrug on the part of some critics. After all, the Pulitzer is usually awarded to a novel that's not as much fun to read as Less was.

A satire of the pretensions of the literary world, Less chronicled the efforts of its hero — the white, gay, American, minor writer, Arthur Less — to outrun his impending 50th birthday and the wedding of his former partner by accepting every invitation to every literary conference, junket, writer's retreat and festival that came his way. Naturally, when news of a sequel to Less was announced, more dismissive shrugging ensued, as though no one remembered acclaimed sequels written by the likes of John Updike , Philip Roth and Hilary Mantel .

Less is Lost picks up with Arthur Less now living with that aforementioned partner, Freddy Pelu, who left his new husband to return to Less. You'd think that demonstration of love would be enough, but Less is a chronically uncertain person, prone to what Freddy, who acts as our occasional narrator, calls a "clumsiness of the heart." The death here of Less' first love, the famous poet Robert Brownburn, only deepens Less's uncertainty, since it turns out that Less owes a decade of back rent on the San Francisco bungalow he's been living in that was owned by Brownburn.

Fortunately, for a writer so minor he's often confused with another minor writer of the same name (even though the other guy is African American), Less has lately been receiving a strangely high number of invitations for lucrative literary gigs — public lectures, glossy writing assignments, and the like. So Less hits the road again — this time in the U.S. Both he and Freddy assume that a separation may clarify their relationship.

Less' first assignment is in Palm Springs, where he'll write a profile of the science fiction writer H.H.H. Mandern, who appeared in the first novel. Here's Greer's skewering description of Mandern:

A bestselling author since his first book, Incubus , came out in 1978 ... H.H. H. Mandern instantly became a towering figure in the world of books, with ... his striped Vincent Price beard ... [and] rock-star behavior such as  ... setting money on fire. ... But nothing stopped his output: a novel, sometimes two a year, and not just any novels but six-hundred-page portraits of interstellar war and alien empire-building that would take a normal human being a year just to type ."

Mandern, always cranky, uses the profile as a bargaining chip to make Less drive him and his pug dog in a decrepit camper van through the Mojave desert for a reunion with his estranged daughter. Thus begins a travelogue through the West and South where, among other misadventures, Less is repeatedly greeted by the proprietors of RV parks with variations on this question, here asked by a lady in Louisiana:

"Now, you're not from around here are you, honey?" ... "No. ..." [answers Less] "See, I thought from how you sounded, you was from the Netherlands.

Less, we're told, "knows what this means. ... and he has never known what to say. Because the question [this woman] is really asking, without at all knowing she is asking it, without meaning anything in the world except that she detects a linguistic flourish, is Are you a homosexual ?"

The question you may well be asking at this point is: Is Less Is Lost as good, as funny, as poignant as its predecessor? To which I would happily answer: Yes, at least!

There are extended comic passages here about Less' Walloon ancestry and a mediocre gay men's chorus singing Leonard Cohen songs that I read aloud, laughing, to anyone I could waylay. But comedy also arises out of pain and Greer smoothly transitions into the profound, such as in this rumination by Less about the empty encounter he has on the trip with his long-lost father:

The moment holds neither disappointment nor delight. Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love — because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.

Greer has said in interviews that this sequel is the end of Less. That would be a shame. Greer should add even more to Less' saga and take him as far as he can go.