Instead of floating through life, like most people, the writer must “pay attention.” Arthur’s previous long-time lover, the much older man and famous poet Robert Brownburn, had told him “I’m sorry you’ve become a writer…I’m sorry this disaster has come for you.”
Greer again incorporates some wry thoughts about the author’s life. The protagonist goes from episode to episode and new problems and new eccentric characters arise at each stop. The picaresque, which has its novelistic base in Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and in America is best represented by Huck Finn, is an amazingly useful form. So-he sets out across the country on another picaresque adventure, to any literary gig which will pay him.
He must earn a lot of money, fast, or lose his little San Francisco home. In this terrific sequel, Arthur has a new catastrophe to deal with. These are reserved for heavy, serious works that carry a load of cultural pain, and are thus deemed important.
Comic novels, like comic films, do not usually win big prizes. “Less,” amazingly and deservedly, won the Pulitzer Prize. He meets some truly odd people, has hilarious adventures, some romantic, and returns. To avoid the wedding, Arthur accepts a slew of invitations he would normally have declined and goes on a round-the-world trip that takes him to NYC, Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, Japan, Tahiti. He is even uncertain as to whether he is or is not a “bad gay,” whatever that means, and Arthur does not know. Arthur has always lacked self-confidence, is emotionally tender and easily rattled. In 2018, middle-aged mid-list novelist Andrew Sean Greer published “Less,” his sixth book, featuring Arthur Less, a middle-aged mid-list novelist whose latest manuscript has just been turned down by his publisher and whose ex-boyfriend, Freddy, has announced his marriage to another.
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