Less – Andrew Sean Greer

Rating: 4 stars

I think the most exceptional part of this book is that it managed to hold my attention. Side story: I was reading the reviews on the back of the book, and while my conclusion was similar to many of them, I wouldn’t ever say it like they did. This is the second book in a row (and many more total in my past) where that’s happened, so I think I should stop reading reviews on the back of a book, no matter how educated or well-known the people who write those things are. I should just like a book or not for my own reasons.

The plot of the book is a middle aged writer, Arthur Less, who’s always lived in the shadows of greater writers, especially one of his boyfriends, a Pulitzer-prize winning writer of the renown Russian River school. In response to his former love getting married to another man, Less decides around the world for a bunch of random invitations he got. One is an awards ceremony in Italy, another is reviewing cuisine in Japan for some magazine, a camel-back trip of Morocco, and there are a few more.

The book is quite self-aware, from the fact that the Less is not the narrator, and Less (who I’m kinda sure that we’re supposed to identify at that point as an analog of the writer) is described as a ‘magniloquent spoony’, which he explains means a verbose gay man. Also the fact that the main character is a writer is supposed to be tongue-in-cheek or something or meta. It comes off as really, really obnoxious, but, as I said in the beginning, the story is compelling enough that I got over that pretty quickly. Less grows in that he starts to realize that the problems come from him, and that, while he isn’t the best, he is pretty good, and that’s fine too.

I think this is a book for writers because 1. the protagonist is a writer and 2. it applies to the vast majority of us (and not Pulitzer prize winners, which this book actually is). Then again, maybe there’s something I’m missing. I’m sure I miss a lot on every book I read.