This came after a long period of living with the older poet Robert Brownburn, a tunnel of love he entered at twenty-one and exited, blinking in the sunlight, in his thirties. He’s also every person who’s armored himself against heartache by becoming a commitment-phobe:Īrthur Less has, for the past decade and a half, remained a bachelor. From Less’s “Thumbelina bottle of red wine” to the “prison blanket, prison pillow” to which he clings, to his years-long battle to be refunded his VAT, Less is every person who wants to see the world but not deal with the struggle to get there. So begins Greer’s hilarious ode to travel. Less thinks, “What could possibly go wrong?” If he accepts them all he could cobble together a trip around the world and be out of town for the wedding and his dreaded fiftieth birthday, too. When the wedding invitation arrives, Less, a midlist novelist on the decline, opens his desk drawer and fishes his hand through a sea of mediocre professional invitations. Then Freddy, his much younger, part-time lover of the past nine years-the one Less keeps warning not to become too attached to him-tells Less he’s met somebody else.

The novel opens with Arthur Less, a life-weary Eeyore staring down the big 5-0 and feeling like the only gay man to have ever grown old. Less teases readers with a mysterious, impossibly omniscient narrator and an artfully structured plot. Greer is a masterful author, and he brings along all his writerly chops from his past five books. This funny and engaging picaresque novel is a departure for Greer, who is best known for his inventive historical fiction, like The Confessions of Max Tivoli and The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells. How can you avoid the pain of heartbreak? For Arthur Less, the protagonist of Andrew Sean Greer’s latest novel, Less, the answer is clear: run away. New York, NY: Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown, 2017.

Less andrew greer