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Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Novel Paperback – May 22, 2018
by Andrew Sean Greer (Author)
3.9 out of 5 stars 359 customer reviews
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A struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding in this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel full of "arresting lyricism and beauty" (New York Times Book Review).
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE
National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of 2017
A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2017
A San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award and the California Book Award
"I could not love LESS more."--Ron Charles, Washington Post"Andrew Sean Greer's Less is excellent company. It's no less than bedazzling, bewitching and be-wonderful."--Christopher Buckley, New York Times Book Review
Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.
Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, 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.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Less is the funniest, smartest and most humane novel I've read since Tom Rachman's 2010 debut, The Imperfectionists....Greer writes sentences of arresting lyricism and beauty. His metaphors come at you like fireflies....Like Arthur, Andrew Sean Greer'sLess is excellent company. It's no less than bedazzling, bewitching and be-wonderful."
―New York Times Book Review
"Greer is an exceptionally lovely writer, capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy.... Brilliantly funny.... Greer's narration, so elegantly laced with wit, cradles the story of a man who loses everything: his lover, his suitcase, his beard, his dignity."―Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Greer's novel is philosophical, poignant, funny and wise, filled with unexpected turns....Although Greer is gifted and subtle in comic moments, he's just as adept at ruminating on the deeper stuff. His protagonist grapples with aging, loneliness, creativity, grief, self-pity and more."―San Francisco Chronicle
"I recommend it with my whole heart."
―Ann Patchett
"A piquantly funny fifth novel."
―Entertainment Weekly
"Greer, the author of wonderful, heartfelt novels including The Confessions of Max Tivoli, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells andThe Story of a Marriage, shows he has another powerful weapon in his arsenal: comedy. And who doesn't need a laugh right about now?"―Miami Herald
"Greer elevates Less' picaresque journey into a wise and witty novel. This is no Eat, Pray Love story of touristic uplift, but rather a grand travelogue of foibles, humiliations and self-deprecation, ending in joy, and a dollop of self-knowledge."―National Book Review
"Dressed in his trademark blue suit, Less adorably butchers the German language, nearly falls in love in Paris, celebrates his birthday in the desert and, somewhere along the way, discovers something new and fragile about the passing of time, about the coming and going of love, and what it means to be the fool of your own narrative. It's nothing less than wonderful."―Book Page
"Greer's evocations of the places Arthur visits offer zesty travelogue pleasures"―Seattle Times
"Less is perhaps Greer's finest yet.... A comic yet moving picture of an American abroad.... Less is a wondrous achievement, deserving an even larger audience than Greer's bestselling The Confessions of Max Tivoli."
―Booklist, starred review
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About the Author
Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of five works of fiction, including The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O Henry award for short fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco. He has traveled to all of the locations in this novel, but he is only big in Italy.
Product details
Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Back Bay Books; Reprint edition (May 22, 2018)
Language: English
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Biography
Andrew Sean Greer is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of six works of fiction, including The Story of a Marriage, which The New York Times has called an "inspired, lyrical novel," and The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O Henry Award for short fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Less, comes out in paperback May 2018.
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Top customer reviews
KasaC
VINE VOICE
5.0 out of 5 starsLess is MoreJanuary 22, 2018
Format: Audible Audiobook|Verified Purchase
Arthur Less is hilariously well-named. In the opening salvo, he is waiting to be escorted to a literary event, sitting in a hotel lobby, while a woman he is meant to meet is circling the room looking for a woman, mistakenly thinking the author of the book she's read cannot be a man. On the eve of Arthur's fiftieth birthday, his partner of almost ten years has announced his upcoming nuptials, and in order to avoid this nightmare, Arthur has cobbled together a trip around the world accepting an odd congregation of invitations to host, attend, and teach various literary events. With each stop, he goes into his past, revealing more and more about himself and his history. Each experience generates memory, both poignant and absurd. Greer has a fine sense of character and irony, and this surpasses other books I've read by him.
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Ulysses Dietz
5.0 out of 5 starsThe first gay book by a best-selling gay author. What does this mean?May 31, 2018
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.”
Andrew Greer is a gifted writer and a skilled storyteller. I started reading this book with a good deal of cynical lip-curling over the precious fumbling of its title character, Arthur Less. My radar was attuned to every little bit of self-conscious “literariness,” that affectation of language through which an author separates him or herself from the herd of other writers. By the last page of the book, however, I was in tears. Somehow, Andrew Sean Greer’s feckless, nearly-fifty, aging-twink author protagonist began, against the odds, to resonate with me.
I am fifteen years older than Andrew Greer, and a decade older than the fictional Arthur Less. Why does this matter? Because age is not just a number: age is your place in history, your worldview, your experience. As a sixty-something gay man, with a husband of forty-two years, the experience of my life gives me a point of view, for good or for ill. I have opinions, especially about other gay men, and particularly about gay men in the public spotlight.
And there, you see, is part of the point. “Less” is a gay book by a gay author that won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2018. This, in the same year that a gay journalist, Ronan Farrow (age 30), won a Pulitzer for his work. This is news. This matters, especially to a gay man of my generation for whom this all feels a bit miraculous, especially given the bizarro-world of our national political scene at the moment.
Arthur Less is a writer, a novelist. He is approaching his fiftieth birthday, and has behind him two decade-long romances that both ended badly. Did they end badly because Less was an idiot? Possibly. When faced with the impending marriage of his second ex-boyfriend, Less does the only thing he can imagine to save himself: he flees. Accepting a half-dozen heretofore ignored invitations from various global destinations, he sets off, still fumbling and irritating, on a trip around the world that will help him avoid the wedding and his fiftieth birthday.
Along the way we get most of Arthur’s life. We meet the “young Arthur Less,” pretty and feckless, talent untapped, as he bumbles into his first relationship. We follow him into early middle age, when one relationship is exchanged for another. At first, it’s not clear how important these two relationships are; but with time, it becomes clear that not only were they important, they were everything.
It’s a little bit as if Arthur has been going through life not quite paying attention. He is often startled, often confused, often hurt. He is not hugely promiscuous, but he is not not promiscuous either. Arthur doesn’t seem to consider the potential significance of fidelity or monogamy. On the other hand, he’s not thinking about heteronormativity either. He doesn’t seem to give much thought to his romantic life, but just sort of takes it as it comes. It’s as if he can’t quite focus—on his writing career, on his emotional life, on the world around him.
At one point, in yet another vaguely surreal moment on his world tour, Arthur is accused of being a “bad gay” by another gay author. He is told by that author (who is presented as supercilious and pretentious), that “It is our duty to show something beautiful from our world. The gay world. But in your books, you make the characters suffer without reward.”
That moment struck me, because this very book, the book that won Greer his Pulitzer, is the first book by this gay author that includes the experience of a gay man; that includes any gay character, as far as I can tell. Greer is an author who, while his being gay is not a secret, never makes being gay a part of his public persona—at least in what I found. He is out, he has a husband, but I had to dig to find it. His other books, which include at least two best sellers, are devoid of any gay content. This book has, for the first time, made him a gay author. And even here, one of the reasons for this book’s success is that it is “A gay guy novel that even a non-gay guy can appreciate.” (Tony’s Book World)
For a gay man of my generation and from my vantage point, this rankles. As a voracious reader, who gathered a big library of contemporary gay literature in the 1970s and 80s, I am leery of gay men who, in this day and age, don’t put gay content in their books. I know this is grossly unfair, because the prejudice in the publishing world (as in Hollywood and in virtually all the arts) is still very much present, no matter what anyone tells you. The world is better than when I was born, but it is not entirely good, not by a long shot, in the way it approaches gay content and treats gay artists.
So, Greer’s first gay book, a book which surely has resonance with the artist’s own life (made doubly so by Arthur Less’s revision of his own latest unwanted novel in the course of this novel) wins him the brass ring, the Oscar of novelists. Is this ironic? Is this a message?
“Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material.”
In the end, this book got five stars from me because it honored both the author’s experience as a gay man, and my experience as a survivor of gay life in a straight world. I expect no less from gay authors. None of the gay authors I read routinely will ever win a Pulitzer prize, and I’m fine with that. I’m glad that I ended up loving “Less,” because it is an important moment in the history of gay fiction. I hope the author cares about this as much as I do.
38 people found this helpful
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A Reader
4.0 out of 5 starsTender, wistful, funnyJuly 31, 2017
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
Tender, funny, sometimes melancholy, written with beautiful language. I first read a chapter of the novel when it appeared as a short story in The New Yorker earlier this year. It was a tour de force of carefully managed absurdity, heartache, and wistful humor. The book is just as good (although its structural device perhaps goes on a bit too long -- one country too many, maybe). Greer's writing is masterful. He manages to be meaningful and funny at the same time, an incredible balancing act. And he is just so lovely with words. This could have really gone off the rails, it could have been repetitive and gimmicky, but he's too skilled a writer for that. 4 stars instead of 5 (4.5 if I could) for what felt like a giving up at the end (that one chapter too many, and too quick an ending). Otherwise, a fantastic book and a truly great discovery.
48 people found this helpful
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Claude
4.0 out of 5 starsClever and enjoyableJanuary 6, 2018
Format: Hardcover|Verified Purchase
The first chapter of the book struck me as a whinging litany of first world problems and I would have dropped the book had not my daughter insisted it was a good one. As the reader later discovers, the author seems to have had the same concern about his work, but ... Arthur Less, The unprepossessing hero kept growing on me, first to raise my empathy and eventually to find our common humanity. Yes, the excellent stylist who is Andrew Sean Greer gets at times a little too clever for the good of the book (hence the four instead of five stars), but I recommend it highly.
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BNGrant
4.0 out of 5 starslike the first phase of a rocketOctober 24, 2017
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“Where was he? Somewhere in there he lost the first phase of youth, like the first phase of a rocket; it had fallen, depleted, behind him. And here was the second. And last. He swore he would not give it to anyone; he would enjoy it. He would enjoy it alone. But: how to live alone and yet not be alone?”
Arthur Less is on the brink of turning 50, and he is beginning to grasp the fact that the days of his youth have passed. A run-of-the-mill novelist, Less finds out that his latest work is on the brink of being tossed in his publisher’s trash bin while faced with the harsh reality that his past lover is getting married. After a string of invitations fall into his lap, Less sets out on a trip around the world, which will allow him to both rework his failing novel while avoiding the dreaded wedding. From New York City to Japan (accompanied by the infamous blue suit he is known for) Less sets out on this journey as a way of avoiding his own insecurities while combatting them at the same time. Every time a plane touches down in a new destination, disaster seems to arise for Less leaving me asking, “Why is this man so cursed?” Greer has crafted a well-written read that kept me laughing as Less navigates his way from continent to continent. Is he trying to run from his unhappiness and regret, or perhaps trying to embrace it? And who is this narrator?
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S. ONEILL
5.0 out of 5 starsAn instant personal faveOctober 28, 2017
Format: Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase
When I finished it, I bought four copies to give as gifts. The book is not going to win a Nobel or be taught in universities or anything but it was a pure pleasure to read and it'll stay with me for the rest of my life.
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