I’m still trying to wrap my head around this book. If it hadn’t won the Pulitzer Prize, I might have just enjoyed it on its own merit (and I did enjoy it) but the Pulitzer has made me look closer and ask why?
Less is charming. That’s what I’ve come up with. It’s a charming book. Arthur Less is a charming protagonist and the world that he inhabits is very charming. There’s some beautiful language in here and Andrew Sean Greer is a masterful writer.
It’s just that… well, it’s just that it’s so goddamned charming.
As I said, I enjoyed reading this book but I can’t really tell you what it was about.
It’s funny. There’s a meta fiction passage in the book where Arthur Less realizes that his novel won’t work because it’s about the problems of a white, middle-aged mid-list gay author (author Andrew Sean Green is a white, forty-eight year old, mid-list, gay author) so he (Arthur Less, the fictional protagonist, not Andrew Sean Green*) turns his protagonist into a hapless comedic character.
And that is basically what this book is about. Arthur Less is about to turn fifty and his sometime boyfriend of nine years, Freddy Pelu, is going to get married. So, in order to avoid attending the wedding that will crush him, he decides to accept every offer to read, teach, accept an award, or write an article that comes his way. His travels take him all over the world from New York to Mexico to Italy to Berlin to Paris to Morocco to India to Japan and, finally, back to San Francisco.
I’ll cut to the chase because I’m tired. The second most interesting part of the book was Less’s reckoning with love’s place in his life. I found his relationship with his former lover Robert Brownburn, he of the Russian River School of poets (is that a real thing?), and Robert’s former wife Marian to be really compelling. Less’s relationship with Freddy seemed almost a dalliance by comparison.
I’m about to give some serious spoilers, so, if you want to read the book, stop here.
The most fascinating part of the book was the question posed by Zhora, Arthur Less’s fellow fifty year old who we find has also gone through heartbreak. Her girlfriend has left her for another woman and we find her in a very bitter place. “We know there’s no love of your life. Love isn’t terrifying like that. It’s walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it’s doing taxes, it’s cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It’s having an ally in life. It’s not fire, it’s not lightning. It’s what she always had with me. Isn’t it? But what if she’s right, Arthur? What if the Sicilians are right? That it’s this earth-shattering thing she felt? Something I’ve never felt. Have you?”
That’s the question that I found so interesting about the book. What is love and what role does it have in your life? There is a tug of war between passion and domesticity, love as the best sex you’ve ever had and love as doing the dishes without being asked.
My frustration with the book is that it doesn’t choose a side, though I suppose that’s not the job of fiction. But it does betray its own question with the end of the book. In the final pages, we find that the first person narrator (95% indistinguishable from a third person omniscient narrator) is Freddy Pelu, Arthur Less’s ex-boyfriend now married to someone else. We also find that Freddy realizes his marriage is a mistake and is waiting for Arthur at Arthur’s door after his trip.
A bit of a deus ex machina, no? I also thought that it betrayed the novel (though not if you’re grading on a charm curve). Less was reckoning with his past, with Robert, with Freddy, and he had to find a way to move on. But, in the end, he didn’t have to. His lover came back. And, given that we didn’t know much of Less and Freddy’s actual day to day lives, we are left without an answer to the question, is love passion or faithful routine?
I guess it’s a balance of both and the weight of each is different depending on different people. But I think I already knew that.
To borrow the book’s most persistent gag, I liked it, but I wish it were a little Less charming.
