 
 
From the Publisher:
PROBLEM:
You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes–it would all be too awkward–and you can’t say no–it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
If you are Arthur Less.
Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. What could possibly go wrong?
Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. In between: science fiction fans, crazed academics, emergency rooms, starlets, doctors, exes and, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to see. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. The second phase of life, as he thinks of it, falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. There will be his first love. And there will be his last.
A love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.
Review:
My first finished book of 2021 is actually an audiobook I began last month. Less, by Andrew Sean Greer is a book so full of heart, I’m still rereading parts of it. Arthur Less is a gay, middling author arriving at 50, fearing the sum total of his writing life will be an ode to mediocrity, while his long-time lover has just gotten engaged to be married. As a result, Less accepts every possible invitation to appear or teach in the most far-flung places in an effort to escape his life and embarks on a tour of the world that is at turns catastrophic and hilarious, all of which teach him about himself, all of which prime him for love.
This book has a huge heart – it’s warm, funny, and generous towards the reader and its main character. I am surprised such a beautifully humorous book would land the Pulitzer Prides but this bodes well for the American literary establishment, which seems to revel in human misery and pathos. The writing is positively lyrical – the author, as well as the character, find joy in wordplay, and the structure of the novel allows for the kind of digressions that easily invites the reader to reflect alongside Less about what his life has ultimately meant and how much more he has left to experience and give. And it’s unabashedly in favor of love. Passionate, life-affirming, enduring romantic love. A beautiful gem of a novel.
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