Infinite Books

Arthur Less, the 49-year-old writer and the protagonist of Andrew Sean Greer’s novel, is on the run. He’s running away from love. The love of his life, Freddie Pelu, is getting married, and Less, in a desperate attempt to avoid attending the wedding, accepts all kinds of literary invitations from around the world. A carefully chosen itinerary will ensure that when Freddie exchanges the wedding vows, Less will be far away and distracted enough not to think about his lost love. Will it work?

 This is a love story. Initially intended to be a solemn account of a painful struggle, it became a satire and a touching, warm insight into the many different sides of love. We see various love stories in each chapter; they are not sentimental musings but show us a distinct yet familiar side of people’s feelings. This book will make a reader smile and think, “yes, that’s me; it happened to me, maybe a bit different, but I sure know the feeling…” This is also a book about aging and remembering our past lovers; our memory gave them immortality. For the famous poet Robert Brownburn, the young Arthur Less will always be “the boy with red toenails,” sitting on the beach.

 There is a conversation in “Less” that asks the question if this is something we want to read about.

 “Zohra asks, “Is it a white middle-aged man?”
“Yes.”
"A white, middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows?
“Jesus, I guess so.”
“Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like this.”
“Even gay?”
“Even gay.”

It might sound like this book’s subject is something we have read about many times. It was the 2018 Pulitzer Prize winner and, in my opinion, surely deserved the prize. The language of “Less” is almost hypnotic – so easy to follow, engaging, and often very funny. Andrew Sean Greer created a fascinating character to follow. As mentioned in the novel, he’s a modern-day Peter Pan. Something poetic and immature about him makes a reader slowly fall in love with this tall, often hapless man, wearing his strange shade of blue suit as armor. He acts with a sense of purpose but nevertheless becomes comical sometimes – because “life is a comedy.”

There is a bit of Less in all of us. Maybe more than we think…

LESS, by Andrew Sean Greer, Little, Brown and Company, 2017