A struggling novelist travels the world to avoid an awkward wedding in this hilarious Pulitzer Prize-winning novel full of “arresting lyricism and beauty” (The New York Times Book Review). WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZENational BestsellerA New York Times Notable Book of 2017A Washington Post Top Ten Book of 2017A San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal … 2017
A San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award, and the California Book Award
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.
“I could not love LESS more.”–Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is excellent company. It’s no less than bedazzling, bewitching and be-wonderful.”-–Christopher Buckley, The New York Times Book Review
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I don’t usually read this genre, but the Pulitzer Prize and the rave reviews drew me in. I found myself eagerly flipping the pages, chuckling aloud at Greer’s clever, witty, scalpel-like turns of phrase and careful understatement of a plot that could easily become maudlin or overblown.
I found myself rooting for Arthur (hap)Less as he meandered his way around the globe, trying to dodge heartbreak, and of course, failing miserably but hilariously.
Anyone who can get me caught up in the sad love life of a mediocre gay novelist is truly a master. Less is more!
I wish I could give LESS MORE stars. This is, hands down, one of the best, most poignant and real books I’ve ever read. It immediately catapults to the top 10 of my favorite books of all time. The fact that it’s probably the first book with gay themes and a gay main character to win the Pulitzer didn’t hurt, either. But, really, this book is about life, love, art, and aging–and it can apply to all of us. To trot out an old chestnut–if you read only one book this year, make it LESS.
I loved this book.
Andrew Sean Greer captures the reader in such subtle ways with his insightful story telling. His writing is phenomenal and I can easily see why this won the Pulitzer. In this gay man turning fifty story, the protagonist, Arthur Less, cannot face the upcoming wedding of his former lover, so he sets out on a round the world adventure marketing his latest novel. At the end of the day, however, this is really a novel about the travels of the human heart. Arthur must take his lengthy journey to discover, in the end, that love resides in places where we least expect to find it. Arthur makes life’s most difficult journey, from his head to his heart, and the reader is cheering for him every step of the way.
I thoroughly enjoyed this entertaining and clever book. The self-deprecating protagonist, Arthur, grows on you with time (and with the help of the narrator) as he travels to Europe, Africa, and Asia grappling with turning 50 and attempting to avoid facing the loss of two loves. Heartwarming and wonderfully written.
I loved this book for a lot of reasons, the first simply being the experience of reading it. I liked how it was written, and the shape of the story. Facing his fiftieth birthday, and an invitation to a wedding he’d rather not attend, Arthur Less books an around the world trip. As he journeys, the story of his life unfolds, and it’s in turns mundane and interesting and funny.
Arthur’s anxiety regarding his career as a writer really spoke to me. He’s not particularly famous and has only ever been nominated for obscure awards he’s never heard of. His feelings regarding these things felt so true. There’s this entire cosmos of being a writer, with bright stars and black holes and all the objects in between that tend to drift according to the rules of universal attraction. It’s… weird, and I felt Greer captured that headspace really well in Arthur.
To me, the story was also about approaching the milestone that is fifty and all the anxiety wrapped up with that. Have I done anything meaningful yet? And, most importantly, am I old now? There was a lot of wonderful discussion about youth and age and the lens we have on others’ lives.
Then there was the love story. It’s pretty obvious from the start that Arthur doesn’t realize, or isn’t willing to accept his heart has been broken. Watching him come to terms with that and accept it was another of those “true” moments in the book for me, because I’ve lived through journeys like this where the breakup wasn’t particularly sensational and it makes no sense that you continue to sink lower and lower until you understand you really did love the person you left, or let go, and then have to grapple with the question of, is it too late?
We get the idea that Less doesn’t think much of himself–and never really has. The surprise, though, is that he doesn’t really seem to know himself that well, which is why the format of this book really worked for me. The story is told through the eyes of someone who knows Arthur extremely well, and loves every part of him, and I took the message of this to be: love every part of yourself, even the awkward and not so nice stuff, because its’ what makes you you.
This Pulitzer prize winning book for 2018 was quite a surprise.
It’s about a failed writer called Arthur Less who receives a wedding invitation from his ex-lover, Freddy. To add to his woes, he’s about to turn fifty, lamenting his old age and the way his life has turned out. Instead of facing his problems, he runs away by travelling the world. Along the way he picks up an award in Italy, teaches in Berlin, rewrites the manuscript his publisher turned down and enjoys a fling or two.
Some failed writer was my immediate thought!
Poor old Arthur Less is a bit hopeless in the love department, a bit clueless about life and how he fits into the world. It makes for some amusing times, although for me, it’s not laugh- out loud funny, yet for others it may be.
“Perhaps Less, alone, is kidding. Here, looking at his clothes – black jeans for New York, khaki for Mexico, blue suit for Italy, down for Germany, linen for India – costume after costume. Each one is a joke, and the joke is on him: Less the gentleman, Less the author, Less the tourist, Less the hipster, Less the colonialist. Where is the real Less? Less the young man terrified of love? The dead-serious Less of twenty-five years ago? Well, he had not packed him at all. After all these years, Less doesn’t even know where he’s stored.”
The writing is magnificent with descriptions of place so intricate and long in sentence that you feel you’re right there in the thick of it.
“It’s nothing like he expected, the sun flirting with him among the trees and houses; the driver speeding along a crumbling road alongside which trash was piled as if washed there; the endless series of shops, as if made from one continuous concrete barrier, painted at intervals with different signs advertising chickens and medicine, coffins and telephones, pet fish and cigarettes, hot tea and ‘homely’ food, …”
I confess to feeling a bit ho hum about this book at first and it seemed like a travel log reminiscent of Eat, Pray, Love – gasp – except the themes of self-doubt, lost love and age are central. I wondered where it was going and as I continued on my reading journey, Arthur Less grew on me, bit by bit. The end brought it all together, the twist, revelation, call it what you will, was fantastic and filled me with love for this book.
Truly a hilarious, sensitive, and poignant novel. Every page is enjoyable. The prose is effortless, the pacing is spot-on, and it hits just the right level of sentiment.
Poignant and funny; almost every page had a great line or a laugh-out-loud moment even as it explores the questions of “what is love? (bolt of lightning or sweet endurance) and how to fit into the world when the world does not fit YOU. The protagonist is a writer, a gay man about to turn 50, who takes a trip around the world in order to avoid the wedding of a former lover. That sentence doesn’t do it justice – I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys thoughtful fiction laced with a sense of humor.
A perfect book to take your mind off social distancing. Funny, tender and absurd, this book was like a tonic!
Best love story I’ve read in a long time.
This book was funny, clever and had some superb scenes. However, I’m not clear yet why it would garner a Pulitzer. The movement of the narrative felt contrived at times and the ending, too. Still, it’s a pleasure to read engaging, comic writing like this. Reminds me that comedy is the hardest thing to write of all.
i cried just once, at the very last page, but for more than one cause: relief, release, a dewy joy, an earnest fondness, and, not least, the writing itself, which left me pining like an adolescent with the english language as my crush. this story felt whole and it made me feel whole just by virtue of being a person. it beautifies–and carries a reminder of–the value of being human.
what a wonderful book.
A delightful read, one that will tug at anyone’s heart and soul. A fast book to get through, I enjoyed and could empathize with poor Arthur Less. A captivating story I’m sure you’ll enjoy.
This is a bloody well written book #authorgoals. The label of Pulitzer Award winner can be intimidating, but don’t fear—this novel has a clean flowing prose, and the story is both deep and entertaining. Less, the story, is full of moments that made me laugh and (want to) cry, and Less, the protagonist, is one whose flaws I fell in love with.
An Amazon reviewer gave this book one star because of “all the gay sex.” Disappointingly, there isn’t much sex at all! It’s not a laugh-out-loud funny book, but it is rather amusing and compulsively readable in its own curious way.
Made me laugh out loud throughout.
Review of Less, a Novel, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize
Authored by Andrew Sean Greer
Reviewed by James Victor Jordan
A Magniloquent Spoony
When we meet Arthur Less, the protagonist in Andrew Sean Greer’s fifth novel, he is almost fifty. He is a mid-list author waiting to hear word from his publisher—hopefully word of a significant advance for his latest novel Swift. Soon after beginning the story, we learn during a flashback that “Arthur Less did not publish until he was in his thirties. By then, he had lived with the famous poet Robert Brownburn.” Irony of ironies, Brownburn, a member of the by-then-almost-extinct collective of Russian River artists, is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. This casts a shadow over Arthur as an inescapable cloak of another person’s fame. It defines Arthur to as great an extent as it defines Bwornburn. So was the 2018-Pulitzer-Prize committee having a bit of fun awarding its annual literature prize to a novel extolling a fictive-Pulitzer-Prize winner? Perhaps. But even those who think that the award should have gone to Lincoln in the Bardo would have to admit that Less unquestionably was a worthy winner of the award. It is hilarious, heartwarming, poignant, illuminating, philosophical: a top-tier latter-day romantic comedy.
Arthur Less’s first novel, Kalipso, was his most successful but only a “moderate success.” When none other than the esteemed critic Richard Champion reviews Kalipso for The New York Times, Brownburn says, “it was a good review.” “But every author can taste the poison another has slipped into the punch, and Champion ended by calling the author himself a ‘magniloquent [meaning grandiose or ostentatious] spoony’ [meaning unduly emotional or sentimental].” Arthur wonders if Champion is “sending a message to the enemy.” Brownburn affirms, telling Arthur “he’s just calling you a faggot,” which is the world of this novel, as it should be in life, is not an insult. Nonetheless, from then on Arthur Less wears the sobriquet “magniloquent spoony” as a badge of insecurity. Every badge has two sides. The opposite side of Arthur Less’s badge of fear is, as he’s told by his current lover, Freddy Pelu, bravery. This is but a brief glimpse of the richness and delicious complexity of character Greer brings to the page.
Life quickly goes south for Arthur Less in the first chapter. Freddy Pelu leaves him to marry another, Arthur is invited to the wedding and must find a reasonable explanation for declining the invitation, and Swift is declined by Arthur’s publisher of almost twenty years. Not sent back for a rewrite. Not given any feedback or criticism, just flat-out rejected. Hence it is with this baggage, with this sorrow, that Arthur begins a trip around the world he’s arranged as his excuse to avoid Freddy Pelu’s wedding with dignity. He’ll travel to New York where wearing a cosmonaut’s helmet before a large crowd he’ll interview the popular science fiction writer H. H. H. Mandern, to Mexico where he’ll attend a literary convocation celebrating the poetry of the too-infirm to travel Robert Bownburn, to Italy where he will attend an awards ceremony where the recently translated- into-Italian Kalipso is a contestant, to Germany where he will lecture, to the Sahara where he will vacation with old friends, to India where he plans to write, revising Swift, and to Japan where he will write a review of Japanese cuisine. The memories and the emotions Arthur experiences during his preignitions are journeys in their own right. And along the way we see Arthur afraid and intrepid.
There are aspects of this novel I would describe as genius. Less, except at times in the flashbacks, is written in first person present tense but almost as if it were written in close third person—the first-person narrator can tell us the thoughts, the feelings of Arthur Less. But who is this omniscient first-person narrator? There are hints but not a full reveal until the end. Then there is the philosophy. In one instance Brownburn tells Arthur that when you meet someone, a time machine is created. Later you can go back in time with your memories to the first time you met the person. But you cannot really know a person from a time before you met him. You can surmise, believe what you’re told or what you read, but that is not a substitute for knowing the person.
For these reasons I award Less a most-praiseworthy review.
Great writing
DNF at 32%. I do NOT understand the hype behind this book. It was extremely choppy and written in a format that, while trying to be deep and thoughtful, just comes off as slow and pretentious.
Arthur Less seems like a nice enough man, and I’m sure his adventures across the globe all to avoid the wedding of an ex-lover are full of crazy shenanigans, however, I will never know. There are too many books on my TBR list that are more worthy of my time than trying to continue sludging though one I don’t enjoy. Sorry.