Less
Andrew Sean Greer
273 pages
Published 2017
✍️✍️✍️✍️
It’s Pride month, so I’m posting a review from five years ago, before I joined the Book Review Crew, because it has become something of a classic. (It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2018.) This was brought to my book club by the our “literary” friend, who adored it; the others were less enthusiastic, but it was short enough that I was willing to try it, if only so I can say I actually read (and enjoyed) a Pulitzer winning novel. I’m not sure what made it so special, but it was completely different to my normal fare, and didn’t make me feel stupid, like most lit-fic does – and it features travel – bonus!
Arthur Less is a gay writer from San Francisco whose life has been defined not by his few relatively unknown novels, but by his past relationship with a famous poet, which ended years earlier. Dismayed that he is about to turn 50 and is single, and that his more recent lover is marrying someone else, he hatches a plan to avoid the wedding by accepting a series of invitations that will take him around the world on a bumbling adventure. Will Less find what he is looking for? It’s worth reading to find out.
I didn’t find this funny, I’ve said it before, I just don’t “get” American humour, but I liked the wry observations and colourful array of characters our hero encounters. His mishaps will be familiar to most serious travellers, as are the almost divine interventions which save him time after time. The ultimate message – that a life which seems sad and ordinary to the protagonist, can appear extraordinary to the narrator describing it, resonated strongly with me, as did the ruminations around turning 50. 3.5 rounded up for the delightful ending.
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