Less

I was not impressed with this book at all. It got my interest because of all the travel involved. In reality the book does not paint an interesting picture of all the places, instead it focuses on the constant dissatisfaction and whining reminiscences of a middle-aged loser. It feels like despite having traveled almost around the world he has learned nothing, gained no perspective and grown in no way as a person. The ending was disappointing and unbelievably cheesy.

DNF @ 38%
I liked the voice of the main character as he was snarky and had dark humour, but about halfway in and nothing has happened and the negativity of the character started to wear me down. The writing style is also difficult to get into - it feels like an unedited manuscript, with long run-on sentences and no paragraph breaks. I should have known because the summary is similarly poorly structured.

5 stars to the audiobook, but 3 for the book itself. Took a while to get into but it was enjoyable. Another great audiobook from Robert Petkoff, who has now become one of my faves. I've listened to books (like this one) I wasn't planning to read just for his performance. Content wise, nothing laugh out loud funny but overall amusing and hopeful.

I liked this, but I wonder if I'd like it more if I'd read it in a more focused way - I kind of dipped in and out over a few weeks, so I kept forgetting who characters were or where Less was in any given chapter, but that's very much on me and not the book's fault. I loved the narrator's voice and I binged the last 75 pages or so (from Morocco on), and it was just so satisfying and the strangest, sweetest little love story at the end of it all, which was unexpected and so charming.

(Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.)

What an amazing book. I enjoyed the playfulness of the story and ridiculousness of it all. Greer really captures issues surrounding gay men. I couldn't help but laugh throughout the book and see the struggles Arthur Less went through. Bravo! I recommend to anyone looking for a ridiculously fun story and heartwarming as well.

I liked this book a lot but not quite as much as I expected to after having been told by many friends how amazing it is. The descriptions are vivid and I absolutely felt like I had a strong grasp of the protagonist but I wasn't wowed. If you like books about writers and artists and the processes inherent to both you'll enjoy this book a lot.

Perhaps this review is slightly spoilery. I mean, there are no key points spoiled... And actually nothing really about what's happening, but I do mention a couple of things that may not be as impactful if you know about before reading the book. I know that would be the case for me, but the majority of people may not care. Either way, proceed with caution.

This book is not what I expected. When I started reading, I thought I wouldn't get much out of it, but the writing pulled me in and I'm really glad I did read it. It was so poetic, funny (but not the laugh out loud kind), clumsy, devastating... Tenderhearted.

Tenerhearted is actually a word that I first encountered while reading this book. Or maybe I saw it before, but it wasn't the right fit and I didn't notice it as I did now. And it describes the book so well, the characters, and I love it so much that right now it is one of my favourite words. Tenderhearted. Lovely word!

I liked everything about this book. I liked the writing style, as I already mentioned, but besides it being quite poetic, I liked how it sometimes went ahead then turned back. It did that without making me feel like it is spoiling the story, but in a way that made me wonder what happened, how did we get here. And it also made me sit on the edge of my seat, it gave me everything bit by bit, not too much, but enough to keep me anxiously reading on.

And I liked the characters. Even when their actions were questionable, I still liked the characters. I liked the way they were flawed. And when I'm thinking about Less being (weirdly, unexpectedly) likeable I cannot not think about Swift too and wonder how did he turn out.

Really, Less is a wonderful book, I enjoyed it a lot.

In Andrew Sean Greer's Pulitzer Prize-winning Less, the titular Arthur Less, a writer, decides to take a trip around the world in the face of two upsetting events: his fiftieth birthday, and the marriage of his sort-of-boyfriend of nearly a decade, Freddy Pelu, to another man. Nothing seems to be going quite right for him: after an auspicious debut, his subsequent novels have declined in both sales and critical acclaim, and he worries that the closest he will come to genius were his years dating Robert Brownburn, an acclaimed poet, and being in Robert's circle of writer and artist friends. When an invite to Freddy's wedding arrives, Less can't bring himself to either accept and be the subject of pitying looks or decline and know he'll set the gossip wheels turning with speculation that he's bitter. So he decides to be absent, creating a trip around the world for himself by accepting invitations for various and sundry events that he'd shoved in a drawer and never intended to actually respond to.

Less begins by leaving San Francisco for New York, where his new novel is gently declined by his publisher. And then it's off to Mexico, then France, then Italy for a prize ceremony for a translation of his book, then Germany to teach a summer course, then a trip to Morocco with friends, then a retreat in India to work on his book, then Japan to write an article about food for a travel magazine, and finally back, having neatly avoided both his birthday and the wedding. Along the way he runs into an ex he doesn't recognize, has a fling with academic, gets a custom-made suit, steps on a needle, and has to destroy his way out of a room. We get perspective on the life he's led through both his own reminisces and the voice of a narrator, whose identity is finally revealed to us as Arthur Less gets home.

I'll admit I was a little skeptical when this was chosen as a selection for my book club. “Funny” books can land wildly differently depending on the reader, and “prize-winning funny” does not tend to be a type of humor I find especially enjoyable. But what a delight this book was! I've talked before about how much my experience of a book can be impacted by what else I've read in the same time frame, and after the self-serious, sometimes ponderous Shantaram, the breezy lightness of Less just hit the spot. But it's not just a fluffy book at all. It's filled with sharp observations and resonant character notes, and the propulsive forward motion of the journey keeps the plot moving at a nice clip. It never gets bogged down anywhere. And while managing all that, it also excels at blending the moments of humor with sweetly poignant emotional work.

Writing a funny-yet-grounded book is hard, y'all. So many things to be balanced, and the Pulitzer has to be at least in part a recognition of how very well Greer crafted his work. Why, after all this gushing, is this not an even-more-highly-rated book for me? Two things: it didn't linger in my mind (books that I rate 9 or 10 stars stick with me long after reading), and the narrator reveal. While I thought it was an emotionally satisfying way to end the book, it didn't make logical sense, which spoiled it ever so slightly. That being said, it's a wonderful book that I heartily enjoyed, with meditations on aging, love, dignity, and identity that run beneath the parts that make you laugh to make you think. I'd recommend it to everyone!

If you'd told me at some point while I was reading the first half that I'd give this a 4-star rating, I would have been skeptical. I couldn't tell if it was tragic and sort of pedantically so, or comic and a little too amused at its own cleverness, but really, Greer laid out his protagonist's dilemma explicitly (“The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.”), and then built skillfully to a point when his protagonist, the brave and hapless Arthur Less, embraces the tragicomedy in a way that I found neither sentimental nor fatalistic. Less is a lovely love story, and I can't recall a “serious” novel that made me laugh out loud this frequently. Great Pride Month read, great summer read.

I loved every page of this wonderful, poignant, heartwarming, amusing book. It should be required reading for all 49-year-olds.

I could not help but wonder if we (including me) would have taken this book so seriously had the love affair involved a woman. It's not the responsibility of this book to take that on, but that thought was never far from my mind while reading.

I'll endeavour to include no spoilers, just an overview.

The simplest explanation of this book would be to say it's a gay version of “Eat Pray Love” . So it feels familiar as a device, and a bit tired.

The characters unfold eventually but for me the book really doesn't come alive until its final third. Some early relationships lack any emotional depth, you wonder why the german boy is there at all? Others make such a brief appearance you think should they have been included at all?

The narrator changing voice to various characters doesn't work for me. I found myself confused about who i was hearing from. There seemed to be no signposting to say new persons thoughts or experiences. I thought it was a misprint the first time it happened.

As a 48 yo artistic gay man i understand the story, appreciate the charm of our protagonist and the loving way he is explored by the author. I suspect that compassion is what will stay with me from this book.

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.

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I am probably going to say an awful lot of seemingly contradictory things here, so the tweet-length version of this post is: Less is full of gorgeous prose but the character and story never interested me one whit.

What’s Less About?

From the back of the book:

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?

Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take the novelist Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India, and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the plight he refuses to face.

Why Didn’t I Just DNF This?

Three reasons, none of which hold any kind of water, but seemed to carry the day.

1. I hate to DNF books, holding out hope that they’ll win me over eventually. Enough have that I can’t shake the habit. (as I explained here)
2. I really hate to DNF books I spent money on. I also refuse to DNF books that I receive from an author or as an ARC. So basically, I’ve learned via this bullet point that I’ll only DNF library books (with incredibly rare exceptions)
3. I finally took this off my TBR shelf because of a reading challenge, and it’d feel strange to cross this off my to-do list without having read the whole thing.

But I came close frequently over the first hundred pages or so, but then I figured while I wasn’t going to have a good time, there were enough gems along the way, that it was worth the bother. Also, there was one thing I was mildly curious about (although I forgot about it until the answer was revealed).

The Metanarrative at Work

This may get too close to a spoiler for the truly phobic, although I’ll be as vague as I can be, so feel free to skip to the next heading.

Throughout the book, Arthur hears some hard things about his work. Someone that he meets along his travels is very frank about the problems with his novels as a whole—although she adored one of them—and their criticisms, he hears a lot about what is wrong with the novel his publisher had just declined to buy from him.

Their words stick with him and at some point, he accepts their argument (at least about his new book) and dives in to rework it in light of those ideas. In his view, at least, saving the novel and maybe producing something his publisher would want—perhaps something that would find success both with the critics and the market.

It could be said—It shouldn’t (probably), but it could—that Greer took an early draft of Less and saw (or was shown) the same things in it that Arthur saw in his new novel, and then took the same approach that his character did, reshaping the work until it resulted in what I just read. I’m sure Greer just came up with this device for Arthur (perhaps started from it) and wrote for it.

Instead, what we really have is the Author coming alongside the reader and telling us “Here’s how to read this book. All those things along the way up to this point? This is what I’ve been doing with them.” I can appreciate why he’d do that, I think it worked pretty well for this book—and I generally like it when authors do that (although I usually think it’s unnecessary and often self-indulgent). I don’t know that the book needed that done, but I think it helped.

It didn’t change my opinion of the novel much, if at all, but it did make me a bit more certain about Greer’s intention and themes.

So, what did I think about Less?

I started with this point, and I’ll wrap up with it here at the end—the prose is gorgeous. If you can go more than three pages without admiring a sentence or paragraph (if not more), it’s because you weren’t paying attention. I can see why readers and critics who connected with the material raved about this and threw awards at it.

But I never connected to Arthur. It’s not his lifestyle, it’s not his indolence, his pretentiousness, his…cluelessness (it’s not the right word, but it’s close enough). I’ve read and enjoyed characters like that before (and will again). It’s just Arthur and his story that didn’t work for me. I found his strategy for dealing with the wedding foolish and cowardly. I didn’t find the humor in the whole less-fluent-than-he-realizes-in-German schtick.* I’m not so sure I ever bought into whatever self-discovery he made. I really think the ending—and what it suggests is about to happen—undercut whatever Less had achieved through his travels.

* On the other hand, DeLillo’s Jack Gladney being unable to read or speak German absolutely works for me. I am not anti-satire involving Teutonic languages. I just thought I should make that clear.

Because I appreciated the writing so much, I can’t bring myself to give this the 2.5/2 stars I’d have otherwise given this. Read other people raving about the book, read the book if you’re curious, but I really can’t recommend it.

Ngl, I googled the qualifications to receive a Pulitzer because I couldn't figure out what would make this book receive such an award other than the manifestations of the main character in the story. I couldn't find much information other than if the board likes the submission, they vote and someone wins. This book was suggested to me by a book loving friend, but it took me two years to attempt to read it. I judged from the cover that it would be about the misfortunes of a white male so you can imagine my surprise when not only is that exactly what the book is about, but the characters even talk about it not being a good selling plot. It's not that I didn't enjoy this book, it was just mundane and okay at best. I will not read the second one.