Less
by Andrew Sean Greer
Summary
Arthur Less is a novelist of modest reputation about to turn fifty. His partner of nine years has become engaged to someone else and has sent an invitation. Rather than attend or decline, Less accepts every marginal literary invitation he has been sent, and assembles from them a trip around the world designed to keep him unreachable for the duration.
He interviews a more famous writer in New York and mishandles it. He teaches in Berlin in German he wrongly believes to be excellent. He goes to a literary prize in Turin, a residency in southern India, a Saharan birthday, and a Japanese assignment to write about kaiseki. Everywhere he is politely humiliated and everywhere he is charming about it.
Greer plays it as farce and it is genuinely very funny, but the comedy sits on real material. Less spent his twenties and thirties with Robert Brownburn, a much older and much more celebrated poet, and grew up inside somebody else's reputation. He is now the last of that circle and the least of it, revising a novel his editor has quietly declined, and the trip keeps handing him evidence of how little his work has travelled.
The narrator's identity is withheld throughout and the reveal is the payoff, so it is worth going in without having it spoiled.
It is short, sweet and much cleverer than its lightness suggests, and the sentences are a pleasure in a way comic novels rarely bother with. Best for readers who want humour that does not sacrifice feeling, or anyone in need of something kind after a run of grim prize winners.
Historical Context & Significance
Less won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the citation praised "a generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love."
Comic novels almost never win the Pulitzer, and the result was widely reported as a surprise, with Andrew Sean Greer saying he had assumed the call was a joke. It was the first outright comedy to take the fiction prize in decades.
Greer wrote it after abandoning a serious version of the same material, having realised that the only honest way to write about his own middle aged disappointments was to make them funny. He followed it with Less Is Lost in 2022, and the pair are now read together as a two book sequence.