Greer (The Confessions of Max Tivoli), an O'Henry-winning author, writes beautifully, but his occasionally Faulknerian sentences are unnecessary. And even in Less's mediocrity, when aided by a certain amount of serendipity (and displayed by the author with ironic humor), he affects people. This is partially proven true, but not entirely.
Arthur Less is not known primarily for his own work but for his lengthy romantic association with a Pulitzer Prize winning author, an older man who was married to a woman when their liaison began, and he believes himself to be the butt of many cosmic jokes and that he is "less than" in most equations. In Greer's wistful new novel, a middle-aged writer accepts literary invitations around the world making his way from San Francisco to New York, Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India, and Japan so that he will have an excuse not to attend the wedding of a long-time lover. It's no less than bedazzling, bewitching and be-wonderful."-Christopher Buckley, The New York Times Book Review "Andrew Sean Greer's Less is excellent company. "I could not love LESS more."-Ron Charles, The Washington Post
And there is his last.īecause, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.Ī 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. 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. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. You can't say yes-it would be too awkward-and you can't say no-it would look like defeat. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the Lambda Award, and the California Book Award 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).Ī San Francisco Chronicle Top Ten Book of 2017
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