By Josh Inocéncio
While visiting the new and queer-friendly Interabang Books this June, I perused the Pride Month display and found a few signed copies of this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Less by Andrew Sean Greer. The Dallas-based bookstore is making a name for itself by frequently hosting author-centered events.
I was drawn to the back cover description, which details a quirky satire where Arthur Less, a middle-aged gay man and failed novelist, decides to skip his ex-boyfriend Freddy Pelu’s wedding by taking an around-the-world-in-80-days style trip so that he doesn’t have to go or pathetically send his regrets. He also wants to escape his home-base, San Francisco, for his 50th birthday. Thus, a series of mishaps follow Less as he travels the globe, accepting every “half-baked” literary event he’s ignored, from obscure prizes to minor speaking gigs, all to avoid Freddy and his new lover. With contortionist scheduling skills, he manages a seamless odyssey to New York, Mexico City, Italy, Germany, France, Morocco, India, and, finally, Japan.
Without knowing much more about Greer or his newest novel, I purchased a copy to incorporate into my summer reading list.
Outside of Mark Twain and Joseph Heller, American literature doesn’t have a rich tradition of satirical novelists; certainly nothing as grand as our British counterparts. Instead, satirists here tend to thrive more in non-fiction and television. But Less, a satire on American travelers and the literary world, didn’t disappoint with its sharp wit, situational comedy, and social critiques.
Narrated by a speaker who remains unknown until the last chapter of the novel, Less opens with Arthur Less, a mid-tier novelist described as “an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered,” as he waits in New York City to interview the famous science fiction writer H. H. H. Mandern. Indeed, with only weeks until his 50th birthday, Less is probably most famous as the former (and much younger) lover of the internationally-acclaimed poet Robert Brownburn. And while he’s written a few novels in his life (all contemporary and queer riffs on the Odysseus myth), he lives in a home paid for by Robert’s Pulitzer money and under the “crazy quilt of a writer’s life: warm enough, though it never quite covers the toes.” Thus, in his adult life, he moves from a relationship with an older man and almost immediately into one with a younger man (a “twink-turned-daddy” as The Guardian’s Patrick Gale writes).
And as Less nervously approaches his 50th birthday, the narrator writes with bombast: “Arthur Less is the first homosexual ever to grow old. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these.” As he ruminates on lost youth in his hotel bath, the narrator poignantly continues, “Less’s generation often feels like the first to explore the land beyond fifty. How are they meant to do it? Do you stay a boy forever, and dye your hair and diet to stay lean and wear tight shirts and jeans and go out dancing until you drop dead at eighty? Or do you do the opposite—do you forswear all that, and let your hair go gray, and wear elegant sweaters that cover your belly, and smile on past pleasures that will never come again? Do you take a lover, like matching nightstands by the bed, so that sex doesn’t vanish entirely? Or do you let sex vanish entirely, as heterosexuals do?”
Caught in between lovers from two generations while still navigating his own, Less wrestles with his middle–aged malaise with a Ulysses-inspired novel titled Swift that his publisher isn’t interested in. As he describes the novel to one of his travel companions in Morocco, where he’s decided to spend his birthday in the Sahara under the stars, she quickly dismisses it. “It was about a middle-aged gay man walking around San Francisco. And, you know, his…sorrows…” Less fumbles. “Is it a white middle-aged man?” she asks. And when Less responds in the affirmative, she says, “Sorry to tell you this. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.” In the wake of his climactic 50th, Less questions his own work through the lens of his life and revises it into a comedy.
Written by a middle-aged white gay man, Greer’s Less lampoons a character with the exact same demographic as he tries to turn his career around and invent a map for the latter half of his life. And with Voltaire-esque gusto, Greer pokes fun at the buffoonish and oblivious American abroad, as Less agrees to teach a writing course entirely in German because he’s convinced he’s fluent in the language since no one has ever corrected his German. Post-Morocco, he travels to India expecting to attend a quiet Buddhist retreat where he can revise his novel only to find himself in a Christian sanctuary punctuated by loud prayers and noisy families.
And, of course, by the end, Less finds himself back in San Francisco—and I won’t spoil any details—in a joyful scenario. As Greer told The Guardian, “There’s a gap on my bookshelf for a story about two men in love that isn’t about trauma and despair and I wanted to write that book.” And as novelist Nell Fink writes, Less is “the most deftly funny romantic comedy I’ve read in years. If you have a sentimental bone in your body (I have 206), the ending will make you sob little tears of joy.” Indeed, I found myself tearing up more from Greer’s novel than I have the more heart-wrenching gay novels I’ve read this summer.
A work that will join the lineages of queer and satirical American novels, Less is bound to enter both households and classrooms as an instant favorite.
Less is available for purchase here.
