book review of less is lost

Arthur Less #2

Less is lost, andrew sean greer.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published September 20, 2022

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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."

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Andrew Sean Greer’s Less Is Lost : A Love Letter to a Gentler America—with a Big Finale

The follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning “Less” delights in the absurd and the mundane.

Andrew Sean Greer’s new novel performs an astonishing magic trick: It makes you forget the state of the world—or, more specifically, America.

In Less Is Lost, we return to Arthur Less, “our Minor American Novelist,” and his partner, Freddy Pelu, with whom he’s spent nine months of “unmarital bliss” on top of the nine years they’ve known each other. This is a story, we are told, of a crisis in their lives: how to keep choosing each other when the freshness of love has, if not soured, perhaps staled. In the midst of this crisis, the death of Less’s ex-lover throws the couple into financial distress, forcing Less to accept a series of improbable literary opportunities across the U.S. in order to keep their home.

Writers may take special pleasure in Less Is Lost for the way it holds a mirror to the unique humiliations of their vocation. (At one point Less is asked to “open” for a delayed, famous sci-fi author, whose fans interrupt Less’s attempts to read by chanting the other author’s name.) But with the wit and warmth that made readers fall in love with Less, Greer can find the absurd in everything. A literary prize committee, of which Less is a part, “is never to meet in person; their meetings are incorporeal, like those of angels.” In Dolly, the black pug who accompanies Less for much of his journey, Less recognizes himself—in her passionate effort to shape her towel into a bed each night, she is a fellow artist (“though more successful in her chosen field”).

What made Less such a deep joy to read was the voice—a playful almost-omniscience that occasionally shifted to reveal a mysterious first-person who looked upon Less with unmistakable fondness. That narrative voice resumes seamlessly in Less Is Lost , with Freddy introducing himself early, then weaving in and out of the story: “Now it is my turn to be uncertain . What other infelicities has Less hidden, forgotten, mislaid? What future is there with such a man?”

Though Freddy himself is physically absent for most of the novel, his voice is what gives the book its life, and his central dilemma is the lens through which the story is told. At times he invites us into Less’s consciousness (begging the question of how much of the story is faithfully reported—by Less to Freddy and by Freddy to us—and how much is imagined, reconstructed…and whether it matters). Other times, the narration pulls back: “How long can a gay man survive in the desert? We are about to find out, for, from our buzzard’s-eye view of California, we see an old conversation van painted a pristine shade of green tottering through the night through the Mojave Desert.” And still other times it shifts to second-person, with direct addresses to either the reader or to Less: “Sleep well, my love. More than a continent lies between us tonight.”

Off-screen, Freddy is nursing his hurt at Less’s description of their relationship— uncertain . When he addresses Less in the narration, there is both a hopeful blurring of boundaries between them and a reminder of our separateness from those we love. Less can no more hear Freddy’s commentary than someone in a horror move can hear the viewer shouting, “Look behind you!” Yet the very act of constructing this story can only be an act of love: “that magical spot where the rivers meet, a tessellated surface not unlike a backgammon board where the clear and muddy waters coexist but refuse to mix.”

Less Is Lost is a love story, but it’s also about how we make art—which is to say, how we make meaning: of ourselves, each other, our lives. At his ex-lover’s funeral, Less encounters a Czech editor who praises the poet’s “Beckett sensibility. That things are broken, in shards, that being human means nothing , that memory is nothing , that love is nothing. ” Less tells the editor he’s got it all wrong. And indeed, the novel feels like an indictment against this very sensibility.

Less’s road trip is characterized by moments of deep human connection, subversion of stereotypes, and jaw-dropping natural descriptions. (Joshua trees are “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?”) In the South, where Freddy warns Less they “kill queers” and “being white might not be enough,” Less dons a handlebar mustache and affixes half a dozen American flags to his conversion van. But Less encounters only kindness, which won’t feel realistic to every reader. Then again, our narrator notes, “Well, my darling, the world is so constructed that men like you will always end up safe in bed. Almost always.”

“Pay attention,” Less’s ex-lover instructed Less when his mother died. “You have to write it down. You have to use it later.” Less is enraged at the idea of using his mother’s death as a writing exercise, but he is reminded, “It’s not for yourself. It’s for someone seven hundred years from now.”

Greer pays attention. And if it’s painful for him, as it is for Less, he also transmutes it into something that may survive the next 700 years: “the restorative tonic of a funny tale.” In times like these, that feels like a gift.

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Review: ‘Less Is Lost,’ sequel to a Pulitzer winner, finds a path to both satire and tears

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Less Is Lost

By Andrew Sean Greer Little, Brown: 272 pages, $29 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Andrew Sean Greer surprised a lot of observers when he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his 2017 novel, “Less.” Comic novels generally don’t do well on the major awards circuit. (Ask Gary Shteyngart or Nell Zink , Sam Lipsyte and so on.) But “Less” was exceedingly well made, a witty tale about Arthur Less, a middle-age, insecure, weak-selling gay literary novelist who hits the eject button on his life after a breakup to take a whirlwind trip around the world. Coincidentally, among the targets of Greer’s gentle ribbing was the Pulitzer Prize itself. “You win a prize, and it’s all over,” a poet tells Arthur. “You lecture for the rest of your life. But you never write again.”

The punch line there was that Arthur desperately wanted to win one of those prizes anyway. And it’s a pretty good punch line now, because Greer not only won the Pulitzer but has in fact written again. “ Less Is Lost ” is a familiar-feeling sequel to its predecessor, which seems to bode ill for its prospects. But if Greer is just reapplying the “Less” formula — insecure, weak-selling, whirlwind trip, etc. — it’s one that allows for plenty of invention and flexibility. Take an uncertain man, a “middle-aged gay white novelist nobody’s ever heard of,” and put him in a host of places he’s uncomfortable in, especially when he’s uncomfortable everywhere, and some amount of hilarity is bound to ensue. Early on we are promised “a donkey, a pug, a whale, and a moose.” In due time the full menagerie arrives.

This time, Less’ travels are restricted to the United States, with Arthur making a mad cross-country dash as privation chases his heels. After the death of his former longtime lover Robert, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Arthur learns that probate court is dunning him for years of back rent in Robert’s San Francisco home. So he’s compelled to take gigs that are respectable but a tick diminishing for a would-be famous author: judging a literary prize; writing a magazine profile in the Southwest; supervising a musical version of one of his stories in the Southeast; taking a speaking tour up the Atlantic coast.

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An identity crisis and deadline pressure will make a writer do funny things, and soon Arthur is roped into an RV trip with a George R.R. Martin -esque writer who’s searching for his daughter. In the process, Arthur unwittingly takes a hallucinogen, plays a lead role in a water-based catastrophe and once again deploys his painfully mediocre German, one of the best items in Greer’s joke bag. Confronted with a group of German nudists, Arthur becomes flustered. “Also shy I am!” he offers lamely. Told they’re talking about breakups, his phrase-book German can’t match the subject he knows best. “Here is a sad conversation,” he tries.

Sad conversation he has, often. Shy he is — entertainingly so. But the truly remarkable thing about “Less” winning the Pulitzer isn’t that it’s a comedy; it is that, at heart, it’s a romance, a genre that faces an even rougher road with prize juries. All the globetrotting in “Less” set a path toward a happily ever after. A similar story is at play in “Less Is Lost,” as Arthur wends his way from San Francisco to Maine, where his beloved, Freddy, is teaching. The RV he drives is nicknamed Rosina, a name that echoes Rocinante, the steed Don Quixote rode in search of his Dulcinea.

The sequel is also thick with matters of love, family and home — when it takes a break from its various face-plants, misunderstandings and yes, that moose. Arthur is striving to reconnect not just with Freddy but also with his long-absent father. In that context, every gag, misstep and line of clumsy German serves the themes of loss and recovery, from the sweater in Arthur’s luggage that’s torn to bits by an electric razor to America itself. “America, how’s your marriage ?” Greer writes. “Your two-hundred-fifty-year-old promise to stay together in sickness and in health? ... Who betrayed whom, in the end? I hear you tried getting sober. That didn’t last, did it?”

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Amid all this, Arthur struggles with the question of what makes him lovable — and if not his writing, then what is it? (A late plot twist in the novel cleverly complicates this question.) That sense of self can be hard on people surrounding a writer, as Freddy — the novel’s actual narrator — points out. “There may be writers whose imaginations are so fertile, they merely plant the seeds and water them regularly, and a novel blooms every year or so — and lucky are those authors’ partners. But all the other writers, it seems, must provide their own manure.”

To extend the metaphor, Arthur generates a lot of muck. What makes his novels funny is Greer’s understanding of how absurdly writers will contort their psyches to feel like they count, like they’re loved. (That’s why it’s better that Less himself isn’t the narrator; it would read as crushingly heartsick, if not a tick mad.) These contortions are also what make the books poignant. The tricky part is balancing the two modes via tone, style and plot. Greer’s task is to ground the absurdity in tenderheartedness without being cute or cloying. In that regard, he masters both — the embarrassing moment but also the gentle grace note — as when he captures the bereft mood of a wake: “Through the window, piano music steals in softly and, finding nothing worth taking, steals back out again and goes silent.”

Early on, Arthur is told by his former lover, the Pulitzer-winning poet, a kind of secret for success, both as a writer and as a person: “Pay attention. ... That’s all you need to do. Pay attention.” The punch line there is that the world is so full of distractions that Arthur misses the opportunity to do that, or finds himself paying attention to the wrong things. That leads to the moments of misdirection that are the lifeblood of funny novels. But trying to pay attention is touching too: Like writing a novel or finding a happy place to call home, it’s hard, worthy work.

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Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer review – diminishing returns

The sequel to the US author’s 2018 Pulitzer-winning novel misses the satirical mark far more times than it scores a hit

H ave you ever been on a holiday where you spend the whole time coveting your companion’s book? A few years ago, I spent a long weekend in France with a friend who smirked and hooted each time she picked up Less by Andrew Sean Greer, a satirical novel about a globetrotting “minor American novelist” who will attend any minor literary event in order to avoid his ex-boyfriend’s wedding. I was making my way through a piece of experimental prose about chemical castration that I was reviewing, casting envious glances from my sunlounger.

So when I heard that Greer had sent his hapless hero, Arthur Less, “Sancho Panza-ing” across the US for a sequel, I chucked both books in the suitcase, convinced I’d guaranteed myself hours of thigh-slapping, slack-jawed glee. My friend, I should add, was not alone in her verdict. Less won the 2018 Pulitzer prize for fiction (the competition included George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo ) and has been hailed by Armistead Maupin and David Sedaris in the most ecstatic terms.

I wouldn’t say a double dose of Less’s literary peregrinations ruined my summer holiday. But the experience of reading Greer’s prose was not unlike watching my friend laugh at it. I just didn’t get what was so funny. Nor was I charmed by the clueless protagonist, a man who believes he is “the first homosexual ever to grow old” but who in literary terms is “as superfluous as the extra a in quaalude”.

The sequel (apparently Greer’s agent counselled against writing one) sees our “slapstick, ridiculous, zigzagging queer” set off on an implausible cross-country odyssey after the death of an ex-lover, whose estate serves him with a bill for back rent on the San Francisco apartment where he lived for 10 years. Less has three months to find the money. Cue a scramble from the Californian coast, across the south and back up the eastern seaboard to his native Delaware. Once again, Less attends kooky literary gigs, sits through farcical prize committees and finds himself at the mercy of the science-fiction writer HHH Mandern. Naturally, there is a pug dog called Dolly to contend with, as well as a donkey, a whale and a moose.

As with Less , this voyage of contrived epiphanies is narrated in the putative present by the hero’s younger on-off boyfriend, Freddy Pelu, whose identity was only revealed at the end of the first book. But what starts as a race against the clock becomes a story about parental schisms and forgiveness. Mandern is searching for his estranged daughter; Less is being pursued by his long-lost German father. But even when we learn about Less being abandoned in childhood, the melancholy of the novel never feels quite traced to its source.

The problem is that the hero is much less than the sum of his parts: one part Peter Pan, one part Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin , one part John Updike’s Henry Bech and a dash of Bertie Wooster. It sounds winsome and fun. It ends up mannered and self-satisfied (a common strain in North American liberal humour, I find: see also, Sedaris, Patrick deWitt, the bits of the New Yorker that set out to be funny). The more Pelu instructed me to “Look at Arthur Less”, the less I could make him out. Our hero’s idiocy – rooted in his incuriosity about other humans – might be funnier were it conveyed with the primal innocence of a Wooster, or told by a more neutral narrator. But from the perspective of an indulgent lover, it’s too self-conscious, too cute – and the constant entreaties let too much daylight in on the comedy. As if dawningly aware of this, Greer threads in a narrative about Less unwittingly stealing opportunities that should have gone to a Black writer and his namesake. But it feels tacked on; a message about white male privilege in order to justify reprising his hero.

As a gentle literary satire, Less Is Lost sometimes hits the mark. I tittered at the prize committee (“This prize is not for those kids who win everything just for putting pussy in the first paragraph”, one judge rants) and smiled at the director of a theatre company: “I am sure you have heard of our six-hour performance of To the Lighthouse (I myself played the Lighthouse) and our eight-hour performance of Gravity’s Rainbow (I myself played the Rainbow).”

But the good gags end up buried under all the pointless pratfalls and improbable pickles. It’s like opening an overstuffed suitcase to find there’s little here you really need.

Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer is published by Little, Brown (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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Review: 'less is lost,' by andrew sean greer.

While scarcely an original observation, actor Sir Michael Caine still nailed it in 2017 when he said, "Comedy is harder to do than drama. You can make anyone burst into tears, but trying to get a laugh is murder." I recalled this truism as I read Andrew Sean Greer's technically accomplished, wildly entertaining "Less Is Lost , " the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Less." Like its predecessor, the new novel is a feat of wit and brio, tougher than it looks.

In "Less" the middle-aged protagonist stared down his demons — and his former boyfriend's impending nuptials — by exiting east, New York to Europe to Africa to Japan, accepting invitations to conferences, literary retreats and a lucrative magazine profile.

"Less Is Lost" picks up just months later. After the taxing death of his friend and first lover, an elderly poet, Arthur faces a mountain of debt. He could lose his homey San Francisco apartment. He reverts to a familiar strategy: he'll canvass the nation for paychecks in a camper named Rosina, accompanied by a pug, Dolly, only now within "this foreign world, his own country."

Arthur treks across three time zones to a Maine rendezvous with his partner, Freddy Pelu, an academic (who'd called off his wedding). From his New England perch, Freddy narrates hilarious, cinematic scenes that include affectionate if campy portraits of Arthur: "Look at his thinning hair wind-whipped into the stiff peak of a blond meringue, his delicate lips, sharpened nose, and elongated chin recalling Viking invaders of the Bayeux Tapestry, as white as a white man can get."

Greer's wordplay is glorious: He drop-shots puns and ripostes, firing up his prose. (One bit of dialogue pays homage to the iconic Abbott and Costello routine, "Who's on First?") Less speaks German, perhaps not as fluently as he believes; Greer translates a laugh-out-loud encounter with German tourists at a hot springs in Arizona.

Is "Less Is Lost," then, greater than, lesser than, or equal to "Less?" Is more of Less less or more? The jokes write themselves, which may be a problem here: Greer is not only winking at the reader, he's winking at himself. Although an agile stylist, he's captivated by the cadences of his own voice, the web of Less' relationships, and an unpersuasive reckoning.

The author's gifts are manifold, though, and "Less Is Lost" finds its path, holding tight to a Kerouac-like exuberance even as Less falls short of the enlightenment he seeks. And despite the novel's self-conscious moments, Greer bears down on his character's quest with a command of craft second to none. Will love conquer all? As Freddy notes, "Well, reader, I will simply let you guess."

A contributing books editor for Oprah Daily, Hamilton Cain reviews for the Star Tribune, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn.

Less Is Lost

By: Andrew Sean Greer.

Publisher: Little, Brown, 272 pages, $29.

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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.

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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. ♦

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, less is lost.

When I reviewed Andrew Sean Greer’s LESS in 2017, I noted a certain similarity to John Updike’s books about peripatetic novelist Henry Bech. And now, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for its predecessor, Greer has strengthened that comparison by sending his protagonist, “Minor American Novelist” Arthur Less, on another odyssey, this time from sea to sea across the United States. While it’s too early to predict if LESS IS LOST will win any prizes, it’s another captivating blend of wry humor and emotional insight that makes for an equally pleasurable reading experience.

Less, “a middle-aged gay white novelist nobody’s ever heard of” who shares his name with a Black writer (the pair of them, in the judgment of bookstores “both too unknown for General Fiction”), unexpectedly finds himself on the receiving end of some welcome attention. The invitations that land in his inbox include a request that he serve on the jury for a major literary prize and an announcement from a group in the Deep South that it wants to mount a theatrical performance of one of his short stories.

"As he did in LESS, Greer ends this heartfelt sequel with a pleasing twist. It’s one of the novel’s appealing qualities that make one hope he might have more journeys planned for his protagonist."

But before Less can savor the sudden demand for his presence, he must deal with a more pressing concern: his impending eviction from the San Francisco bungalow he shared for 15 years with famed poet Robert Brownburn, 25 years his senior, and now occupies with his much younger partner, Freddy Pelu. Freddy is the novel’s narrator, a high school English teacher who’s writing from his vantage point in Maine, where he’s decamped for a writing conference. Brownburn has just died, and although he allowed Less to dwell in the “Shack” (as it’s affectionately known) after their breakup, the late poet’s ex-wife and executor of his estate informs Less on the day of his former lover’s funeral that he’s now on the hook for 10 years of back rent, due in 30 days.

Less’s financial straits launch him on an odyssey into the Mojave Desert with octogenarian science fiction writer H. H. H. Mandern and his black pug, Dolly, in Mandern’s bright green camper van nicknamed Rosina. He’s accompanying the decidedly more famous writer for a magazine profile that will earn him some quick, desperately needed cash. But after Mandern departs, Less heads eastward for Louisiana in Rosina, with Dolly as his companion, to connect with the traveling theater troupe that’s dramatizing his short story, based on his father’s abandonment when he was a child. He’s been told that an unknown benefactor will provide a generous stipend to him for the right to perform the story. A cryptic note from his estranged father stirs his imagination into believing that the senior Less is the mysterious financial supporter.

On the road through a vividly evoked desert Southwest and verdant Southland, “our hero” (as Freddy frequently refers to him) grapples with memories of his childhood in Delaware, a place he likens to “trying to describe an airplane meal you had a half century ago,” and his fears that Freddy may be on the verge of abandoning him for another man, especially after informing him in a phone call that “something needs to change between us.” For all its comic moments, these struggles give the novel a resonance that serves to make it much more than a manic romp.

Less’ encounters with an assortment of quirky characters and his occasional mishaps along the road tend toward the mild side. However, Greer’s consistently keen perception, easy wit and lively prose make for an enjoyable but meaningful trip, one that’s easy to imagine taking cinematic form someday. He skillfully captures his protagonist’s persistent unease as he traverses a part of the country that doesn’t seem especially hospitable, even as it “feels ordinary to Arthur Less not to belong.”

LESS IS LOST is peppered with piquant observations on the craft of fiction and the state of American society. Less, once told by a fellow writer that he’s a “bad gay,” endures a lecture from a Czech editor who tells him that the “problem with American writers” is that “you are all New Yorkers.” As Freddy describes him, in a tone that’s equal parts affection and exasperation, Less possesses an almost childlike optimism that’s a mirror of his country’s, “a mindset so UnitedStatesian you could serve it with ketchup.”

As he did in LESS, Greer ends this heartfelt sequel with a pleasing twist. It’s one of the novel’s appealing qualities that make one hope he might have more journeys planned for his protagonist. If they’re as entertaining as his latest, he can be sure that many readers will be happy to join him for what certainly will be a delightful ride.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg on September 28, 2022

Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

• Publication Date: June 27, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Humor
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• ISBN-10: 0316498912
• ISBN-13: 9780316498913

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Less Is Lost : Book summary and reviews of Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

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Less Is Lost

Arthur Less Book #2

by Andrew Sean Greer

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Published Sep 2022 272 pages Genre: Literary Fiction Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

In the follow-up to the "bedazzling, bewitching, and be-wonderful" ( New York Times ​) bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Less: A Novel , the awkward and lovable Arthur Less returns in an unforgettable road trip across America.

"Go get lost somewhere, it always does you good." For Arthur Less, life is going surprisingly well: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freddy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis has Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him on a zigzagging adventure across the US. Less roves across the "Mild Mild West," through the South and to his mid-Atlantic birthplace, with an ever-changing posse of writerly characters and his trusty duo – a human-like black pug, Dolly, and a rusty camper van nicknamed Rosina. He grows a handlebar mustache, ditches his signature gray suit, and disguises himself in the bolero-and-cowboy-hat costume of a true "Unitedstatesian"... with varying levels of success, as he continues to be mistaken for either a Dutchman, the wrong writer, or, worst of all, a "bad gay." We cannot, however, escape ourselves—even across deserts, bayous, and coastlines. From his estranged father and strained relationship with Freddy, to the reckoning he experiences in confronting his privilege, Arthur Less must eventually face his personal demons. With all of the irrepressible wit and musicality that made Less a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning, must-read breakout book, Less Is Lost is a profound and joyous novel about the enigma of life in America, the riddle of love, and the stories we tell along the way.

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Reader reviews.

"Greer follows up his Pulitzer-winning Less with another delightful road story featuring middle-aged writer Arthur Less...Though a bit overboard at times, Greer packs in plenty of humor and some nicely poignant moments. Fans will eat this up." - Publishers Weekly "Greer does sometimes write beautifully about life and about fiction...If you loved the first one, you might love this, though it is a bit less fresh and a tad slow." - Kirkus Reviews "Andrew Sean Greer's new novel performs an astonishing magic trick: It makes you forget the state of the world—or, more specifically, America... Less Is Lost is a love story, but it's also about how we make art—which is to say, how we make meaning: of ourselves, each other, our lives. Greer pays attention. And if it's painful for him, as it is for Less, he also transmutes it into something that may survive the next 700 years: 'the restorative tonic of a funny tale.' In times like these, that feels like a gift." - Oprah Daily "The ending of Andrew Sean Greer's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Less , did not demand a sequel—it ended so perfectly—but lucky us, we're getting one anyway. Beloved Arthur Less, once again fleeing his problems, accepts invitations to a bunch of literary events and heads out on the road. This time, he's traveling throughout the United States. As he proved with Less , Greer excels at pinpointing the funniest parts of the writerly life, and we expect him to return to this winning comic realm." - BookPage "Technically accomplished, wildly entertaining...Like its predecessor, [ Less Is Lost ] is a feat of wit and brio, tougher than it looks...Greer's a master of the picaresque...Greer's wordplay is glorious." - Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Only Arthur Less could be both frustratingly stuck, yet on the move. Let loose, yet totally lost. Full of wit, but without a clue. And while he runs from himself, finds himself at the same time. Put all of that on a wild road trip through a wilder America, and you end up with something hilarious, affecting, and unforgettable." - Marlon James, winner of the 2015 Booker Prize "Excited to be reunited with our neurotic hero Arthur Less, I ripped through this sequel. It was a thrill to go on this odyssey with Less where even the most picayune comic encounters turn profound. Vulnerable and witty, Less Is Lost is a joy." - Cathy Park Hong, bestselling author of Minor Feelings

Author Information

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Andrew Sean Greer Author Biography

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 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. Greer lives in San Francisco. He has traveled to all of the locations in his novel, Less , but he is only big in Italy.

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Lost And Found

Andrew Sean Greer continues his comic epic of gay love and commitment in ‘Less Is Lost’

Pulitzer-Prize winning Andrew Sean Greer has written an engrossing must-read sequel to his Pulitzer-Prize winning work ‘Less’. He calls it, appropriately, ‘Less is Lost.’   The story picks up several years after we left Arthur Less and his lover Freddy Pelu on the brink of reuniting after a tumultuous separation. Greer shows chutzpah in writing about a gay love affair as if it were meant to last forever. Despite societal gains, it’s still a relatively new thing .

‘Less’ told us about how Arthur Less, then in his mid-thirties, was still reeling from his first ex-lover’s exodus years ago.  Less had given the first 15 years of his young adult life to the famous imperial poet, Robert Brownburn, whom he had met accidentally on a San Francisco beach. He moved in with Brownburn shortly afterwards when his wife left.

Less had adored Brownburn, a very difficult man who expected Less to run their household smoothly so Brownburn could give his full attention to his writing.  Smitten, Less did as he was told, but not without resentment. When Brownburn eventually left a decade and a half later, after both of them had gotten sloppy, Less was convinced the possibility of having a long-term love relationship ever again had passed him by. He had his chance, and he had blown it.  But soon enough Less was in love again, almost by accident; this time with the much younger Freddy Pelu, whom he had been with now for nine years.  It had been a blissful time, until Freddy blindsided him with the news that he was leaving to marry another man.

Less, Sean Greer’s alter ego, felt he had to get out of town. He arranged a business trip related to his work as an author, so he would not have to be present when his lover Freddy married another man. The humiliation and public shame of it was unthinkable. Much of  Greer’s first book deals with the adventures of Arthur Less as he travels the world attending literary panels, and making speeches, while really thinking about what will happen to him now that Freddy has left him. He knows he is no spring chicken. But what he doesn’t know is that Freddy’s marriage lasted barely a day because he was still hopelessly in love with Arthur Less.

The book “Less” startled the literary world not only by winning the Pulitzer and selling more thann a million copies, but by taking us into the mindset of contemporary gay men and their feelings for one another now that the enticing but terrifying possibility of ‘forever’ exists for them.  Critics marveled at the way a certain joyousness sprinkled over it’s pages; muting the melancholy Andrew Sean Greer felt had been the mainstay of highbrow gay fiction. Greer wanted to believe there could be stories about gay men like himself who depression and loneliness didn’t completely engulf. ‘Less’ ends on a hopeful note; where the possibility of happiness between the two men remains resilient.

 Greer has one of his main characters, Freddy, narrate the story for us. He becomes Greer’s masterpiece. Freddy’s ability to beautifully express his undying love for Arthur Less, without fear of censure, coupled with his ability to see clearly his lovers foibles and missteps remain sandblasted in the reader’s imagination.

Andrew Greer had already started a sequel, but his first book’s extraordinary success must have intimidated him. He seems a lot like his alter-ego Arthur Less. He grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C.,  both his parents worked as chemists, he started writing stories at 10, and became a creative writing major at Brown University, where he came out to his parents only to find out they already knew. His mother took it as the perfect time to announce she was a lesbian. Greer now lives with a romantic partner of many years.

Greer believes many gay men like himself have been able to find their own long-time loves that speaks to being happily ever after. He dwells inside a social circle where this had once been possible. He seems by nature upbeat and decided in a epiphany one morning that he would give his book a comic slant and his manuscript suddenly started to almost piece itself together.

In this charming and more penetrating sequel, ‘Less is Lost,’ Less and Freddy are still together, but unspoken cracks between them need mending. A crisis has emerged. Robert Brownburn, Less’s ex-lover, owns the house they’ve been living in. When Brownburn departed, he let Arthur remain there for free. But Brownburn has just died and his wife wants the house and rent for the years they have stayed there. Once again, Arthur hits the road to make enough money so they can remain where they are.

Arthur is no longer the bronzed young man he was when he lived there with Brownburn; middle-age has taken it’s toll on him.  He worries about his mortality, his reflection in the mirror, and whether Freddy still finds him attractive enough. But his literary career has skyrocketed and people in many places want him to come speak about his books. The trip, like the one he took years before, soon turns into a series of comic mishaps.

But beneath the hijincks that follow him wherever he goes, he feels a sadness about something going on between him and Freddy that is different from before. Greer is masterful at showing us how this sort of unknowing knowingness that something is amiss can sneak into a relationship and tear at it, perhaps even destroy it. We sense these men love one another.But Greer and Less seem to be wondering if that is enough.

Freddy’s narration is tender and heartbreaking at times.  Even though Freddy is home alone, Andrew Sean Greer grants him the power to see Less navigate a wider America that doesn’t always welcome him with open arms. Many sense Less is different, and ask him if he is from Scandinavia, but Less knows this is just their code for gay, and most of them find his otherness off-putting.  His father, who abandoned him as a child, is looking for him to tell him something important according ti Less’s sister, but she doesn’t know what he wants to tell her.

The road trip seems to enter into a manic phase where Less must succumb more gracefully to each day’s unexpected catastrophe. He tries to visit Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s homes in Mexico, but they aren’t situated where they are supposed to be. So much is out of place, it seems. Greer has found a masterful way to show us how we project our insecurities onto the world.  Less isn’t really concerned with each of the events he must attend; or even with all the things that keep going wrong.  He just wants to know why there is so much silence in his nightly calls with Freddy, and why sometimes Freddy doesn’t answer at all.

Readers don’t often give enough credit to finding the precise register in which to write, but Greer nails comedic pranks and silliness nestled amidst heartache with the aching precision of a surgeon. Greer’s rendering of Freddy is unforgettably moving. We get to hear Freddy recall his first days with Less. He recalls how he was only a kid at the time and Less came to one of his uncle’s beach parties. No one spoke to him because he was just a kid, but Less did, allowing Freddy to draw a portrait of him and taking the drawing  with an appreciative nod. It was a gesture Freddy would long remember.

Greer then allows Freddy to recount Less’s first gay sexual encounter. He tells us how afterwards Less began each day filled with “bouts of sobbing, sessions of terrible poetry writing, afternoons listening to Leonard Cohen, and private moments bringing Reilly’s light blue sweater to his face, trying to recapture some lost molecule, some leftover scent, which he himself, of course, had washed away.”  Other guys walked away from their first encounters feeling a sense of liberation.  Not Less. This initial wound stayed with him. Greer paints for us, in the intricate characterization of Freddy, a lover’s lover like no other.  We come to know him as someone who listens and cares intensely for Less. Someone willing to do anything for him.  Freddy didn’t only listen to what Less said; he listened carefully for things he had stopped saying.

Freddy knows he is more insecure than Less, but believes life without him would be unlivable.  He describes himself humbly as a “short and slight man approaching 40, the age at which the charming eccentricities of one’s twenties (sleeping in a silk bonnet to save my curls and wearing rabbit eared slippers ) becomes the zaniness of middle age.  My curls have patinaed like scallops on old silver; my red glasses magnify my myopia; I am winded after chasing the dog one time around the block.  But I am as yet unwrinkled: I am no Arthur Less.  Rather I am what I call an alloy (and my grandmother would call a pasticcio.)  Of Italian, Spanish, and Mexican heritage-mere nationalities, being themselves a mixture of Iberian, Indigenous, African, Arab, and Frankish migrations, breaking down further until we get to the elemental humans from whom we all descend.”

Freddy is trying  to keep optimistic, but as the weeks pass and Less isn’t with him, there are times he feels despair thinking “What other infidelities has Less hidden, forgotten, mislaid?  What future is there with such a man?”

Greer’s creation of both Less, who strikes us as a gay Everyman of today’s modern cosmopolitan world, and Freddy, who has the uncanny ability to see things Less can’t, work together to create for us a loving genuine relationship that is in the process of testing itself.  As readers, Greer has invested us in their future.  And we have come to believe in Freddy’s persistent gaze as a magical antidote to all that ails them. We believe Less will return to him. Greer’s second act is worthy of the first; he has done it again.

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Elaine Margolin

Elaine is a book critic for The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Times Literary Supplement, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jerusalem Post, Denver Post, and several literary journals. She has been reviewing books for over 20 years with a sense of continual wonder and joy. She tends to focus on non-fiction and biographies.

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Less Is Lost (The Arthur Less Books, 2) Hardcover – Large Print, September 20, 2022

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Book 2 of 2 The Arthur Less Books
• Print length 304 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date September 20, 2022
• Dimensions 6.3 x 1.3 x 9.55 inches
• ISBN-10 0316301396
• ISBN-13 978-0316301398
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Editorial Reviews

" Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer: If you, as I did, loved the Pulitzer-Prize winning Less , then you’ll be excited to learn that Greer has penned a sequel about the lovable writer, Arthur Less. This time, Less is on a road trip in the States with a famous science fiction author and his black pug named Dolly. Hilarity ensues."

About the Author

Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of six works of fiction, including the bestsellers The Confessions of Max Tivoli and Less . Greer has taught at a number of universities, including the Iowa Writers Workshop, been a TODAY show pick, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellow, a judge for the National Book Award, and a winner of the California Book Award and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. He is the recipient of a NEA grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in San Francisco.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company; Large type / Large print edition (September 20, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316301396
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316301398
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.3 x 1.3 x 9.55 inches
• #1,570 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Books)
• #14,052 in Humorous Fiction
• #77,358 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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.

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Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

• Publication Date: June 27, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Humor
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• ISBN-10: 0316498912
• ISBN-13: 9780316498913
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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

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SEEN & HEARD

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

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

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week

“kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us.”.

Our quintet of quality reviews this week includes Leigh Haber on Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, Chris Power on The Diaries of Franz Kafka , Lily Meyer on Neel Mukherjee’s Choice , Alexis Coe on Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest , and Padgett Powell on Paul Auster’s In the Country of Lost Things. 

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.

“Though the novel is both sweeping and intimate, spanning seven decades and six continents, from World War II through the aughts, Messud’s piercing interiority keeps the focus tight, gaining the reader access to her characters’ innermost thoughts. Her attention to detail, memory, and foreshadowing suggest the influence of Tolstoy and Proust, but what’s most evident as we turn the novel’s 400-plus pages is the sense that we are engaging with work that is extraordinarily personal to the author. There’s a reason for that: The fascinating—and singularly dysfunctional—family about which Messud is writing is her own. In portraying the Cassars, Messud hews closely to a 1500-page ‘family history’ her grandfather wrote and bequeathed to her. The novel is narrated from the points of view of a cast based on her grandfather, her father, her mother, her aunt, and the author herself …

In writing this breathtaking ode—and lament—of a novel, Messud honors her ancestors by interrogating the circumstances that shaped them and the questions that plagued them. As she wrote in Kant’s Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write : ‘Our human passion for storytelling—not simply for sharing information, but for giving meaning and shape to events—has motivated individuals and armies… stories have held up a mirror and taught us who we are and what we believe.’ It is in this spirit that Messud gifts us with her family’s journey.”

–Leigh Haber on Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History ( The Boston Globe )

“Benjamin’s aim is to catch Kafka in the act of writing, and to present the diaries not as a cohesive whole, as Brod’s version does, but as ‘Schrift, writing as a fluid, ongoing, goalless activity.’ To this end we get spelling mistakes, scraps of abandoned stories, entries that break off in mid-sentence, and, due to Kafka’s habit of rotating between notebooks rather than writing in one until it was finished, an achronological experience in which we might read the back half of a story 200 pages before its beginning, or pinball from 1912 to 1914 and back again. Brod’s version smoothed such irregularities away, as well as prudishly cutting anything sexual.

The Kafka whose posthumous reputation Brod did so much to control, until death loosened his grip in 1968, was not a brothel visitor, nor someone who would describe a male Swedish tourist’s legs as so taut ‘that one could really only run one’s tongue along them.’ More important, in terms of changing the uniquely intimate experience the diaries offer, was Brod’s decision to excise the fiction. One of the book’s greatest pleasures is to read a dull list about who Kafka wrote letters to the day before, then turn the page and discover the first draft of The Judgment, the story that marked a revolution in his work … This new edition restores the variegated richness—and, at times, the tedium—of the diaries…

The muddled presentation of all these elements, contextualized by thorough notes, gives the sense of Kafka not just as ‘the representative genius of the modern age,’ as Benjamin describes him, but also a youngish man finding his way, hungry for experience and inspiration, venting his frustrations and following his interests. Here Kafka seems both genius and ingenue, and the contradiction brings him closer to us … the diaries, in which fiction, confession, dreams, wry humor, and despair combine in a messy, hypnotic network, feel like the closest thing to a path, so like a tripwire, that leads to the threshold of Kafka’s abiding mystery.”

–Chris Power on The Diaries of Franz Kafka ( The Guardian )

“The Civil War is one hell of a drug. It’s plentiful and Main Street-legal, but can induce hallucinatory visions when mixed with inflammatory substances … When Larson, the reigning king of Dad History, drops a new book on the Civil War a month and a half before Father’s Day in a pivotal election year, he knows what he’s doing. Sort of. The Demon of Unrest   is Larson’s first book on the Civil War. And his green horns show …

A Larson book is like the Dead Sea: The extraordinarily dense level of details…usually allows readers to float on his narrative without much effort. I tried my best not to swim, but on more than one occasion, I almost drowned from exertion, especially in the incredibly banal final stretch. And still there was something lacking in the book’s 565 pages: Nary a Black person, free or enslaved, is presented as more than a fleeting, one-dimensional figure. Frederick Douglass, a leading abolitionist and standard of histories of the era, warrants no more than a mention. Black people are primarily nameless victims of an antagonistic labor system that’s causing a political crisis among white Americans … A swaggering disregard for the difference between the shopworn and the truly complex that leads straight into the pitfalls of nostalgia and hubris.”

–Alexis Coe on Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War  ( The New York Times Book Review )

“It’s a triptych novel in the vein of Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry , which use their three parts to repeatedly surprise and challenge readers. Compared with these novels, Choice is both more ambitious and less successful, harmed by the fact that its second and third sections just cannot compete with its blistering first. But that first section is a barn burner. Mukherjee starts Choice with the story of Ayush, an editor at a prestigious London publishing house, whose obsession with the climate crisis lands somewhere between religious fervor and emotional disorder—especially as far as his kids are concerned …

By not showing the consequences of Ayush’s actions, Mukherjee leaves incomplete the book’s exploration of parenting. What his abdication means to Masha, Sasha, and Luke is hidden. What it means to the reader, though, is clear. In Choice , there is no such thing as a perfect decision or a decision guaranteed to go right. There are only misjudgments and errors—and the worst of those are the ones that can never be undone.”

–Lily Meyer on Neel Mukherjee’s Choice ( The Atlantic )

“The novel is Anna’s letter home to an old friend from childhood. Into this letter, this chronicle of unrelenting travail for Anna Blume, Mr. Auster, author of the highbrow mysteries of The New York Trilogy , proceeds at a trilogist’s pace and with a series of high-novel dares … These are daring touches, and they let us drop all notion of having to suffer a didactic, finger-wagging account of how we ruined ourselves. Not Mr. Auster’s game at all. What did happen? ‘Collapse’ is the entire explanation offered—late in the book—again, the worst word conceivable for the free-enterprise believer, yet nowhere is there a suggestion that a socialist order has prevailed. As if to further not let us worry on this score, Mr. Auster keeps on offering novelistic dares. He will try to surprise with the obvious, and he will advance the story with the madly (but somehow not maddeningly) coincidental. The boldness of these maneuvers—rather like the big lie—allows them to work …

These are heavy chords that Mr. Auster gets away with playing because they are not, one feels, the main music; in fact, some of the large action here may satirize narrative action itself … Mr. Auster seems most interested in this problem of confronting a limited thing with talk that shall not be, or cannot be, limited…It is an asymptotic approach of expression to the nothing it finally defines, an infinite series of effables toward the ineffable. It is not simply objects that are disappearing. Human things are on the wane too. Mr. Auster offers Anna nothing in the way of hope and wants her to make a generous, human account of it anyway. In light of this aim, if indeed it is Mr. Auster’s, it is telling that (Louis-) Ferdinand is bumped off early, and that Anna, facing a world ever bleaker than Celine’s, remains resilient, plucky, apologetic for uncivilized behavior necessary to survive, and hopeful yet.”

–Padgett Powell on Paul Auster’s In the Country of Lost Things ( The New York Times Book Review )

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Kristi Noem Describes Executing Puppy She ‘Hated’ in New Book

• By Nikki McCann Ramirez

Nikki McCann Ramirez

If there’s anything a politician should avoid saying in public, it’s that they murdered a perfectly healthy puppy. But to South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem — who is seen as one of the top contenders to be Donald Trump’s running mate — a willingness to shoot a dog who was “the picture of pure joy” proves her governmental chops. 

In No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward — Noem’s forthcoming book which was reviewed by The Guardian — Noem describes in excruciating detail the brief life of Cricket, a 14-month-old wire-haird pointer puppy she intended to use as a pheasant-hunting dog. 

Noem describes Cricket as having an “aggressive” personality she hoped to calm by taking the dog on a hunt. According to the governor, Cricket didn’t so much hunt as have “the time of her life” chasing birds and going “out of her mind with excitement.” 

On their way home, Noem made a pit stop at the home of some locals who owned chickens. Cricket, fresh off her joyous bird-chasing romp, escaped the truck and began terrorizing the chickens, Noem writes. 

“Like a trained assassin,” Noem writes, Cricket began “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” While it is legal in South Dakota to kill a “dog found chasing, worrying, injuring, or killing poultry or domestic animals,” it’s by no means required, and there’s no indication the owners of the chicken made any such demand. 

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“I hated that dog,” Noem recalls, calling Cricket, “less than worthless as a hunting dog,” “untrainable,” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.”

“At that moment […] I realized I had to put her down,” the governor recalls. 

Noem dragged Cricket to a gravel pit, and shot her dead in front of a startled construction crew. “It was not a pleasant job but it had to be done,” she recounts, “and after it was over, I realized another unpleasant job needed to be done.”

The governor then decided that another one of her animals was deserving of summary execution — a mean old “disgusting, musky, rancid” goat who sometimes chased her children and messed up their clothes. Pretty normal behavior if you’ve ever been around a goat but in Noem’s eyes, a capital offense. But unlike Cricket’s mercifully quick death, Noem botched her first shot at the goat, and was forced to run back to her truck for more ammo to finish off the wounded animal. 

Dan Lussen, a professional hunting dog trainer , told Rolling Stone that a 14-month-old dog is a “baby that doesn’t know any better.” 

Trump ‘Disgusted’ by Kristi Noem’s Puppy Execution Story

Kristi noem falsely claims she met kim jong un in dog-killing memoir, kristi noem defends executing 14-month-old dog: ‘it was not a puppy’.

“Why would you put a dog down with these instincts? It’s a hunting dog, and you got chickens — he doesn’t know the difference,” Lussen adds. In his experience, dogs are similar to racehorses in that not “all of them will make it to great stakes,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re bad. 

Training requires “consistency” he adds. “And it could be an inconvenience to be consistent, or its laziness on the owner’s part. Dogs are lifelong learners, and some [people] think they’re people but they’re not.” 

Governor Noem’s office did not respond to questions from Rolling Stone attempting to clarify if she sought professional training for Cricket before cutting the young animal’s life short. In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Noem wrote that while “we love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm,” adding that she’d recently had to “put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years.” 

We love animals, but tough decisions like this happen all the time on a farm. Sadly, we just had to put down 3 horses a few weeks ago that had been in our family for 25 years. If you want more real, honest, and politically INcorrect stories that’ll have the media gasping,… pic.twitter.com/bKhpUkchHV — Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) April 26, 2024

“Most Americans love their dogs, and we suspect that they will consider Gov. Noem a psychotic loony for letting this rambunctious puppy loose on chickens and then punishing her by deciding to personally blow her brains out rather than attempting to train her or find a more responsible guardian who would provide her with a proper home,” PETA Senior Director Colleen O’Brien said in a statement provided to Rolling Stone. “Gov. Noem obviously fails to understand the vital political concepts of education, cooperation, compromise, and compassion.”

Amanda Shires Didn't Hide From Her Divorce at First Show With Jason Isbell

Kendrick lamar comes back for more on his second drake diss track this week '6:16 in la', randy travis lost most of his speech in 2013. how did he record a new song.

“Hey, where’s Cricket?” she recalls her daughter asking. 

We can only imagine the effect learning your mom shot your dog might have on a child.

Treating Wounds, Removing Bullets: This Student Is Saving Lives in Gaza

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A Novel of Lost Daughters and Waylaid Lives

Prison, pregnancies and other operatic turns propel Caroline Leavitt’s latest book, “Days of Wonder.”

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Michael Callahan’s third novel, “The Lost Letters From Martha’s Vineyard,” will be published in May.

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DAYS OF WONDER, by Caroline Leavitt

When the unfairness of life overwhelms you, does it bring out your grit and resolve, or send you down a rabbit hole of grievance and desperation?

Such is the crossroads facing three deeply damaged people in Caroline Leavitt’s 12th novel, “Days of Wonder”: Ella Fitchburg, newly released from prison after being convicted of trying to poison her wealthy boyfriend’s father; her teenage love, Jude, a victim of domestic abuse who’s lugging his own millstone of guilt; and Ella’s mother, Helen, who was cruelly cast out of her Hasidic Jewish community as a pregnant teenager.

Ella, too, is pregnant when she begins her 25-year sentence, but is pressed to give the baby girl up for adoption. Freed nearly two decades early thanks to a governor’s intervention, Ella, now 22, tracks down the child, who has been adopted and named Carla, and hastily moves from Brooklyn to Ann Arbor, Mich., to be close to her — without disclosing her real identity to her daughter’s new parents. A cross between Sylvia Plath’s sardonic Esther Greenwood and Allison McKenzie from “Peyton Place” (the Mia Farrow iteration), Ella mostly covets security and a bigger place in the world, clinging to a deluded dream of her, Jude, Carla and a life they can never have.

All along we feel Ella’s deep longing, her pain at having been so spectacularly cheated by life. Alas, that doesn’t prevent her from coming off as a creepy stalker: She hides in a back booth at the bar where her daughter’s new dad works, pops up like a disturbed jack-in-the-box to sneak cellphone pictures of Carla and anonymously leaves knitted mittens in the family mailbox.

We’re also asked to sustain some serious suspension of disbelief. Despite a closed adoption, Ella quickly discovers her daughter’s location when a lawyer sloppily exposes a file with the family’s address; Ella meets Carla after the little girl’s errant ball miraculously rolls in front of her feet at a playground, a trope for the ages. Perhaps most ludicrous: With zero experience Ella lands a job as a freelance “Dear Abby”-style columnist for a weekly newspaper in Ann Arbor and is able to support herself on it. That’s worthy of the same eyeroll we collectively delivered when Carrie Bradshaw was somehow able to afford all those Cosmos and pricey shoes.

Leavitt is clearly in her element here: Her previous novels are a soapy collection of women experiencing pain, regret and, ultimately, redemption. But the task of untangling the characters’ myriad secrets and the foggy mystery that binds Ella, Jude and Helen together is harrowing, and leads to some cutting of corners (Ella’s alacrity at becoming best friends with Carla’s adoptive mother seems a tad convenient). It also results in a denouement that feels as overly tidy and soulless as a sample home.

While it moves intermittently between the trio’s individual story lines, the narrative is largely driven by Ella — Jude and Helen seem to serve as more of a supporting cast, present to both reflect her pain and mark the road of broken promises she’s trudged. The sometimes clichéd plotting is helped by Leavitt’s graceful prose: Ella sees her mother as “a dry, twisted sponge that could no longer expand”; falling for the high school dreamboat Jude, she finds herself out of her depth in his social circle, not knowing “how to dress in the casually-mussed way of the teenage elite”; upon release from prison, she threads her way through a throng of reporters, “their voices like thorns.”

The novel’s title is a tad misleading; the book is far less about wondrous days than about the tenacity required to survive life’s bad ones. Ultimately — and despite enough melodrama for “General Hospital” — it heralds the power of steady perseverance, sturdy faith and the raw restorative power of love.

DAYS OF WONDER | By Caroline Leavitt | Algonquin | 320 pp. | $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 .

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“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 .

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

Canada’s Sophie Grégoire Trudeau wants to be your next lifestyle guru

Trudeau, recently separated from her husband, Justin Trudeau, is rebranding herself in a new book, ‘Closer Together.’ Billed as a memoir, it has little dish.

Former unofficial first lady of Canada Sophie Grégoire Trudeau may be a publishing genius. Her new book, “ Closer Together ,” with the cover photo of its telegenic author turned toward the reader, presents as a memoir, a beckoning. It suggests that she might spill samovars of tea about her nearly two decades of marriage to the beguiling, ever-youthful Justin Trudeau, a man who easily tops any list of World Leaders We Would Date.

In a recent profile in Vogue , the yoga instructor and accomplished outdoorswoman teased readers with her sense of abandon, likening herself to “a wild horse in a stall.” There are times, she said, when “I just want to run in a field.” This is not one of those times.

Granted, she wrote and submitted the manuscript before she knew she and the prime minister would separate, but Grégoire Trudeau’s new book is true to its subtitle, “Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other,” a tome of impassioned self-improvement with barely a soupçon of political history.

To be sure, Grégoire Trudeau is a master of intimacy and sharing — but not too much.

She tells us about the challenges of dealing with an eating disorder, infertility, her loneliness as an only child, her anxieties. She’s candid about her emotional struggles without being even remotely open about the most compelling aspects of her extraordinary life.

Readers learn almost nothing about what it was like to be married to the Canadian prime minister of almost nine years — the couple separated in August — and the demands of her role. True, they are still married and share the raising of their children, and Trudeau remains Canada’s leader, but, honestly, she makes Melania Trump seem loquacious by comparison.

Justin Trudeau enters nearly midway through the book. “To make a long story short, we went for dinner in Montreal, and then ice cream, and then karaoke, and then back to his place,” she writes. Before driving her home from a date in 2003, the budding politician informed her: “I’m 31 years old. I’ve been waiting for you for 31 years. Should we skip the girlfriend phase and start with fiancée?”

Why shorten this story? It’s a great story. Surely, there are more. By the next page — poof! — the enchanted Québécois disappears. Operas and extended miniseries could be devoted to Grégoire Trudeau’s exquisite mother-in-law, Margaret, who dated Jack Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal, kept company with Ted Kennedy and Mick Jagger , and graced Studio 54. What do we learn of her? “She has an incredible sense of humor.” And what of Grégoire Trudeau’s late father-in-law, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau? All we are told is that he and Grégoire Trudeau shared a love for the same brand of packaged oatmeal cookies. (For the record, they’re Dad’s .)

Early in her tenure as unofficial first lady (Canada doesn’t formally recognize the wives of its prime ministers as official, so it grants them almost no budget), Grégoire Trudeau touched off a firestorm when she requested additional funds to manage family and public duties. Does she mention this? No, she does not.

Instead, we have a book exquisitely dedicated to this wellness moment. We accompany Grégoire Trudeau on a journey of radical self-acceptance with her clinic of experts. She acquires a “universal emotional library,” a corpulent glossary of buzzy, Goopy concepts which includes a “patriarchy primer” and insights into “mindful masculinity.” She informs us that sleep is good. Screens are bad. Exercise is great, especially in nature. Resilience? We are so far above resilience. We have moved on to “thrivancy,” which is “five steps higher than” resiliency.

She devotes many pages to Stephen Porges’s debated polyvagal theory, “how an unregulated nervous system makes it difficult for a person to build a relationship of trust with themselves and with others,” even though, by her own admission, “some experts say his theory remains unproven .”

It is easy to like Grégoire Trudeau. She’s curious, earnest and a superb interviewer, her book studded with conversations with specialists, plus quizzes and so many tips to becoming our better selves.

It is less easy to admire the former talk show host’s prose. “Closer Together” is composed in TED-Talkese, geared more toward an audio audience than visual readers. It’s blemished with too many announced intentions like “whom we will hear from later,” “as readers of this chapter have discovered” and “We’re going to get into some science here, but stay with me; I promise it will be worth it.” This is groan-inducing “writing” that celebrities and self-help authorities are permitted, and that smart editors should excise on initial reading and banish from this Earth. Frankly, “Closer Together” reads like an extended proposal for a wellness talk show. I hope she lands one. She has already launched a communications company and will publish a children’s book next year.

Let’s be honest, as Grégoire Trudeau might wish us to be. Would she have landed this book contract, would Hillary Clinton and Arianna Huffington have blurbed its wonders, would Vogue have profiled her, would we be reading and reviewing her work if Trudeau wasn’t her last name? Well, no.

Throughout “Closer Together,” in her many informative Q&As, she refers to herself as Sophie Grégoire, sans the Canadian baggage of Trudeau, while being constantly surprised that so many authorities would share their time with the prime minister’s longtime wife.

She has our attention. She’s told the story she wished to share, not necessarily the one we wanted — and therein lies her genius.

Karen Heller is the former national features writer for The Washington Post.

Closer Together

Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other

By Sophie Grégoire Trudeau

Random House Canada. 294 pp. $30

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Book review: ‘The Hope ‘91 Sled Dog Race’ brings an audacious but improbable event to life on the page

“The Hope ‘91 Sled Dog Race: From Nome, Alaska to Anadyr, Russia”

By Helen Hegener with Jon Van Zyle, Frank Flavin and Sandra Medearis; Northern Lights Media, 2023; 232 pages; $39.95.

“Hope 91 International Intercontinental Sled Dog Race, a most improbable, impossible attempt at sled dog diplomacy between the superpowers took off from Nome on April 6, 1991,” Sandra Medearis writes in a recent book commemorating the event. “About 200 believers and skeptics out of a town population of 4,200 lined the chute to see eight stalwart mushers off to the Soviet Far East.”

It’s easy to see why some were skeptical. The Hope 91 Sled Dog Race challenged mushers with an audacious idea. Gather in Nome and head northward up the coast of Western Alaska to Wales, where Soviet helicopters would pick them and their dogs up, and ferry them over the Bering Strait to Uelen in the Russian Far East. From there they would head south to the port city of Anadyr. That the entire event was organized and launched within about two months made its success seem even more questionable. But succeed it did.

The story of how the race came to be, and what happened along the way, is the subject of “The Hope ‘91 Sled Dog Race,” a recent book from Helen Hegener, the prolific popular historian of Alaska, and especially of sled dogs . And in typical fashion for Hegener, she’s brought in other writers to add a range of perspectives, filled the pages with a treasure trove of photographs, and included reproductions of source materials for readers wanting to dive deeper into the story. It’s a treat.

The book opens with background about the region’s history. Before the United States and the Soviet Union got involved, the Bering Strait was home to numerous Indigenous peoples who had extensive trade networks and family ties on both sides. Indigenous movement across the Strait was routine until the Cold War began, and what became metaphorically known as the Ice Wall divided the two countries. For nearly five decades, travel between them came to a dead halt.

1991 was a unique time in global history. The Cold War was effectively over, and the Soviet Union was just months from collapse. The Berlin Wall had fallen in 1989, and there was a sense of optimism that was impossible to explain to those too young to have experienced the era. The world felt like it was opening up, and that our worst conflict was behind us. It was in this atmosphere that the race was staged.

The idea first germinated three years earlier during the legendary Friendship Flight, when a delegation of Alaskans flew from Nome to Provideniya in Chukotka to promote business and cultural ties between the two far-flung northern provinces. What began as a pipe dream would take on a life of its own when a small cadre of experienced race organizers that included official Iditarod artist Jon Van Zyle, who contributes photographs and memories to this book, decided to make it happen. It was 1991, winter was well underway, and with spring not that far off, time was limited.

They made it happen. Despite enormous logistical challenges, difficulties with Soviet as well as American bureaucracy, entrants having to pay all their own costs, and no purse for the winner, 14 men and women were at the starting line that April morning with teams ready to go. The race was on, although from the outset the spirit was amicable and largely noncompetitive.

As she has done in other books, Hegener has ceded lengthy sections of this one to other authors. The text on the race itself was penned by Medearis, and is drawn from her account of the event, originally entitled “The Work of Dreamers.” It’s a worthy inclusion and a good way to present the story. Medearis, who passed away in 2022, was the media and communications director for Hope 91 and was present the entire way. Her contributions here amount to a firsthand telling, one that wouldn’t be easily available otherwise.

[ With her publishing company, Helen Hegener brings Alaska history (and more) to readers ]

In the ensuing pages, as readers follow the dog teams up the coast of Alaska, they ride along. This part of the story is fairly brief and culminates in Wales, where their progress was waylaid by the need for visas for the pilots. This time it was the American government, not its Soviet counterpart, dragging its feet.

After a brief but frustrating delay, they reached the village of Uelen in Russia, where they were joined by six Chukchi mushers. Part of the idea for Hope 91 was to help these men, well accustomed to using dogs for hunting and transportation, learn how to race them, something that requires a different set of skills.

The trip was marred by tragedy as the mushers headed south. Villagers from Novo Chaplino found and broke into the alcohol that had been cached along the trail for use as stove fuel, and drank it. Five died immediately and two soon afterward. Seven more were hospitalized.

Despite vigorous questioning from Soviet authorities, the race was allowed to proceed. After a few more incidents involving either fun or fear, the teams began arriving in Anadyr, with cheering crowds to greet them.

Here Medearis’ narrative concludes, but Hegener provides a bundle of additional materials, spread throughout the book and piled on at the end. Newspaper articles from the time, official correspondences, interviews, reminiscences from some of the participants, and more. She reprints musher Kate Persons’ own lengthy account of the race and gathers the perspectives of other entrants and support staff.

She also shares authorial credit with Hope 91′s official photographer, Frank Flavin, who provides dozens of images, and with Van Zyle, who shares his own photos and frequently entertaining commentary.

The book has a couple of hiccups, uncharacteristic of Hegener, but she runs a one-woman shop. The story found here was begging to be told and she’s assembled it nicely. “Hope ‘91″ and the story it tells remind us that, not so long ago, as the Cold War sputtered to its conclusion, hope was alive on both sides of the Bering Strait. May it be so again one day soon.

[ Book review: A new history of sled dogs in North America is vast and intriguing read ]

David James

David A. James is a Fairbanks-based freelance writer, and editor of the Alaska literary collection “Writing on the Edge.” He can be reached at [email protected].

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Book Reviews

'real americans' asks: what could we change about our lives.

"The trouble with beginnings is that there's no such thing," muses the narrator of Rachel Khong's debut novel Goodbye, Vitamin . "What's a beginning but an arbitrary point of entry? You begin when you're born, I guess, but it's not like you know anything about that."

The difficulty of demarcating starting points also animates Khong's new book, Real Americans , which begins at least four times: The book is carved up into three novella-length sections, each told from the perspective of a different character, plus a prologue. Khong's latest begins, faute de mieux, with a short set piece in Beijing in 1966 before leaping forward to 1999. In this first section, we meet Lily, one of the book's three protagonists. While working as an unpaid intern at an online travel magazine in New York, she crosses paths with Matthew, a "distractingly hot" asset manager who works in private equity.

They bond over the rather banal fact that they were both born on Long Island and the more consequential fact that they vaguely knew one another as children. The art-history major confesses, "I wasn't the sort of person who yearned to shape a landscape. I wanted only to observe it." Matthew is intrigued enough to propose, after just a few dates. After she loses her job, he wires a thousand dollars to her bank account each week, no questions asked, and gives her a separate allowance to redecorate their condo. It's only when they're about to get married that Lily finds out that Matthew is the scion of a blue-blooded family; he uses a different surname to deflect attention. After they conceive a child via IVF, she discovers a secret connection between Matthew's parents and her own, which splits the family apart.

'Goodbye, Vitamin' Is Sweet — But Not Sugarcoated

The book then skips ahead to 2021 and lodges us in the perspective of Nick, Lily's son. It's by far the most plodding and prosaic section, giving us chapter and verse on Nick's teenage years, college relationships, and eventual employment at a foundation whose "many projects included vaccination campaigns; addressing health inequities; screening against diseases in utero," and more. The strongest parts are the early years, when we encounter the high-achieving teen fretting over college admissions; his mother wants him to stay close to their home in Seattle, whereas he itches to matriculate at an Ivy League school on the East Coast. "I was self-absorbed without even knowing who I was, or who I should be — an exasperating combination," he self-mockingly notes. Long estranged from Matthew, Lily raised Nick to understand that his father wanted nothing to do with him. When Nick finally does meet his father — after doing a DNA test — his life takes a fairly predictable turn. Money is an open sesame, unlocking doors to the most prestigious universities, secret societies, and jobs. But the accumulation of it turns Nick into an automaton.

The third and most memorable part of the book is told largely from the perspective of May, Nick's maternal grandmother. It opens in 2030 with a now octogenarian May trailing her grandson, who works at a "biotechnology startup." Nick had been led to believe — once again by his mother — that his grandmother had died years ago, but after bumping into each other in a drugstore, they slowly form a friendship and she unfurls the story of her life. As an adolescent "in the southern basin of the Yangtze River," the "outspoken" May drank in scientific knowledge and distinguished herself as a young scholar. The amount of research Khong did for this section alone, brimming with strange and delightful facts, could earn her an honorary doctorate at some university. In this section, Khong also masterfully evokes the atmosphere of Beijing during the time of the Cultural Revolution and the Four Pests campaign. In school, May strikes up a romance with a fellow student named Ping; together, they "study the lotus and its repair mechanisms" and dream of running away together to the U.S. to become geneticists and escape the oppressiveness of Mao's China. Their dream doesn't come to pass — or only part of it comes to fruition: After a short stay in Hong Kong, May manages to find a job in the U.S., but her new life starts with the "wrong man."

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An element of fantasy suffuses all three stories: May and her descendants possess the power to "keep time still." At first, this power feels less like a volitional exertion than the onset of a panic attack. To go into more detail about what exactly is going on would spoil part of the fun of reading the final section; suffice it to say that the time-arresting power has something to do with "an ancient lotus seed." Like his grandmother before him, Nick learns to control this power and opportunistically exploit it by studying longer and more intensely than his classmates.

Many philosophical ideas get an airing in Real Americans , including the existence of free will and the ethics of altering genomes to select for "favorable" inheritable traits and suppress unfavorable ones. "What could we change about our lives? Could we nudge inheritance in particular directions?" wonders one character. Unfortunately, too many of these moral conundrums are expressed in the baldly straightforward manner of a scientific study. But the questions that drive May's academic research baldly double as animating questions for the novel. Unsubtle as they are, they're also queries that we will likely have to answer in the near future — a time when polygenic screenings are increasingly common, people lengthen their lives with elixirs, and beginnings become harder and harder to recall.

Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer from New York whose criticism has appeared in 4Columns, The Baffler, The White Review, The New Republic, Public Books, Village Voice, and others.

'A Man in Full' review: Tom Wolfe Netflix series is barely a glass half empty

Don't judge a book by its cover, but can you judge a TV show by its A-list pedigree ? Don't bet on it.

Netflix's new Atlanta mogul miniseries "A Man in Full" certainly looks like it should be the next big thing to take over our binge-watching hours. Created by David E. Kelley and directed partly by Regina King , "Man" has all the makings of prestige television: Movie stars as the lead characters. A literary tome (Tom Wolfe's 1998 novel) as its source material. Topical storytelling. Lots of profanity.

But looks can be deceiving. "Man" (now streaming; ★ ½ out of four) is that rare disappointment that adds up to less than the sum of its parts. The series is half-formed, a rough draft for something better down the line. And all the fake Southern accents from the likes of Jeff Daniels, Diane Lane and Lucy Liu can't magically create deeper characters, better scripts, or a fuller world to immerse yourself in. It's the fast fashion of television: Trendy, pretty, but very easily falls apart.

Interview: Jeff Daniels loads up for loathing in 'A Man in Full' with big bluster, Georgia accent

Charlie Croker (Daniels) is the favorite son of Atlanta. A Georgia Tech football hero turned real estate mogul, he has everything a man of distinction could want: Money, power, a beautiful young second wife (Sarah Jones) and the adoration of high society. Except one of those things is only a facade: Croker's companies are nearly a billion dollars in debt, and the bank has come calling. That charge is led by mousy Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey), a middle manager whose hatred of Charlie goes beyond professional rivalry, and Harry Zale (Bill Camp), an alpha male wannabe out to beat Charlie in the financial arena.

In chaos and about to lose everything, Charlie turns to his chief counsel, Roger White (Aml Ameen), a man with a strongly ingrained sense of justice, who tries to keep his hands clean amid the dirty dealings in Atlanta. Roger is currently being hounded by his old fraternity brother and incumbent mayor Wes Jordan (William Jackson Harper, "The Good Place") for help digging up dirt on his conservative opponent. And Roger is trying to help Conrad (Jon Michael Hill), a Black man who has been arrested after a racially fraught run-in with law enforcement.

Rounding out the already unwieldy story is Martha Croker (Lane), Charlie's ex-wife with plenty of hate for her former spouse, and her best friend Joyce Newman (Liu), who is trying to keep part of her past a secret amid the politicking in the city's elite.

It's a lot, and Kelley and the writers are never clear about who the star of this story really is. Is it Charlie, an Ozymandias-type king doomed to fail under his own hubris? Is it Raymond, the Iago channeling his insecurities into war with a stronger opponent? Is it Roger, a Black man torn up on the inside, a Don Quixote unsure about the realities of the world?

I'm using a lot of high-minded literary references because "Man" fancies itself a high-minded work of art, all metaphor, allegory and foils, the language of Wolfe's novel. But these devices are so weak they blow away in the wind.

The series misses the building blocks of good storytelling in pursuit of the cherries on top of the sundae. The characters aren't nearly deep enough, and it's impossible to discern most of their motivations. That's especially true of Harry, who hates Charlie for no good reason, and Martha, who has no personality that isn't related to her ex-husband. Joyce is a plot device dressed in fashionable high heels, and Charlie's wife Serena marks a criminal underuse of Jones, who proved herself deeply skilled in "For All Mankind."

Atlanta is the setting but it's meant to be more than that. It's meant to be the context of every scene and sentence of dialogue. It should be as deeply drawn as a fictional world like Westeros or Middle Earth. But other than Daniels' accent and the racist judge that Conrad faces, "Man" could be set in any major city in America. And that's not good enough.

Speaking of that accent, Daniels slathers it on his performance like too much gravy on biscuits. He seems to ooze rather than act. He's a cartoon character, which would work if the series was purely a soap opera. But it's trying. (and failing) to be more important than a soap. In one moment you see two horses mating and in another, a Black man is being swallowed whole by a legal system designed to ruin his life. The two halves don't mesh together.

There's a sense that Netflix was attempting to cash in on the lifestyles of the rich and famous schadenfreude from HBO's hit "Succession," which ended last year. But "Man" fails to achieve the scope or satire that made "Succession" so successful. There's a watchable quality you can find in any of Kelley's series. But the sheen wears off quickly. It's not addictive or delicious, no "Big Little Lies" or "Ally McBeal" drama to keep you wanting more.

Charlie can wax poetic about loyalty and goodness and masculinity all he wants, but at a certain point, "Man" becomes too easy to tune out.

And at that point, you might as well turn it off, too.