Book Report: Less

21. Andrew Sean Greer, Less (2017) (8/25/18)

Ann Patchett, on the cover of the paperback, recommends Less with her whole heart—and I do too. Though a quick glance at Goodreads suggests that not everyone is as enamored as I was of this bumbling, clumsy, rather clueless, but ultimately (I'd say) lovable protagonist. I'm glad I was. I really enjoyed this book.

The story is something of an international road trip as Arthur Less, seeking to flee the country as the wedding of his younger lover of nine years—to another man—approaches. He is also about to turn fifty, which is giving him conniptions. So he accepts various invitations: he will conduct an interview with a well-known writer in New York; participate in a conference in Mexico City centered on his former lover, a well-known poet of the bohemian "Russian River School"; attend an awards ceremony in Turin (an older book of his, recently translated into Italian, is among those nominated); teach a writing class in Berlin for three weeks; indulge in a trek across Morocco, invited by a friend to fill an empty spot on a trip organized by another birthday celebrant whom he does not know (it is there he will turn fifty); engage in a writing retreat in Kerala, India; and finally, spend two days in Kyoto, where he will review kaiseki cuisine for an in-flight magazine (this last an opportunity won in a poker game).

Of course, none of these experiences goes as planned. Misfortunes, embarrassments, and disappointments galore arise. But along the way Less learns some things—about letting go, about enjoying what he has, about humor and wisdom, survival and grace.

I found the writing wonderful. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, always with fresh turns of phrase, and with wonderful observation, both external and internal. Here are a few samples:

What had Freddy meant, "the bravest person I know"? For Less, it is a mystery. Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.

And at the Italian awards ceremony:

The only speaker is a handsome Italian . . . whose appearance on the podium is announced by a crack of thunder; the sounds goes out on his microphone; the lights go out. The audience goes "Aaaah!" Less hears the young writer, seated beside him in the darkness, lean over and speak to him at last: "This is when someone is murdered. But who?" Less whispers "Fosters Lancett" before realizing the famous Brit is seated just behind them.
 The lights awake the room again, and no one has been murdered. A movie screen begins to unroll noisily from the ceiling like a mad relative wandering downstairs and has to be sent back into hiding. The ceremony begins again, and as the mayor begins his speech in Italian, those mellifluous, seesawing, meaningless harpsichord words, Less feels his mind drifting away like a spaceman from an airlock, off into the asteroid belt of his own concerns. For he does not belong here. It seemed absurd when he got the invitation, but he saw it so abstractly, and at such a remote distance in time and space, that he accepted it as part of his getaway plan. But here, in his suit, sweat already beginning to dot the front of his white shirt and bead on his thinning hairline, he knows it is utterly wrong. . . . For he has come to understand this is not a strange funny Italian prize, a joke to tell his friends; it is very real. The elderly judges in their jewelry; the teens in their jury box; the finalists all quivering and angry with expectation; even Fosters Lancett, who has come all this way, and written a long speech, and charged his electronic cigarette and his dwindling battery of small talk—it is very real, very important to them. It cannot be dismissed as a lark. Instead: it is a vast mistake.
 Less begins to imagine (as the mayor doodles on in Italian) that he has been mistranslated, or—what is the word—super-translated, his novel given to an unacknowledged genius of a poet (Giuliana Monti is her name) who worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian. His book was ignored in America, barely reviewed, without a single interview request by a journalist (his publicist said, "Autumn is a bad time"), but here in Italy he understands he is taken seriously. In autumn, no less. . . . How has it come to this? What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth? Decided by high school students, in fact. Is there a bucket of blood hanging high in the auditorium rafters, waiting to be dropped on his bright-blue suit? Will this become a dungeon at last? It is a mistake, or a setup, or both. But there is no escaping it now

Spoiler: Less wins the prize. But more than that, he makes some first steps in confronting his own talent and ambition, even as he continues to obsess on love—which is another theme of this book, along with time. In Morocco, with the woman who's celebrating her fiftieth a day before him (which he ends up celebrating alone, for various reasons), there's this:

Zohra's voice comes loudly from her camel: "Shut the fuck up! Enjoy the fucking sunset on your fucking camels! Jesus!"
 It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they've survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It's that they've survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up. 

I flagged a lot of passages and could go on. But what I most enjoyed about this book was the heart: the humor and the heart. Late in the book, his lover's father (who has never liked Less), while explaining that he's always thought that people's lives are split in two, either tragedy followed by comedy, or the reverse—and he'd always considered Less in the reverse category—tells him:

"Arthur, I['ve] changed my mind. You have the luck of a comedian. Bad luck in things that don't matter. Good luck in things that do. I think—you probably won't agree with this—but I think your whole life is a comedy. Not just the first part. The whole thing. You are the most absurd person I've ever met. You've bumbled through every moment and been a fool; you've misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you've won. And you don't even realize it."
 "Carlos." He doesn't feel victorious; he feels defeated. "My life, my life over the past year—"
 "Arthur Less," Carlos interrupts, shaking his head. "You have the best life of anyone I know."
 This is nonsense to Less.

I came away from this book feeling uplifted and even a little full of resolve myself, to pay better attention, to appreciate my own life more, to look harder for the humor and absurdity in things. I found it celebratory.