Book Review: LESS by Andrew Sean Greer

In a most unusual fashion, I read Pulitzer Prize winner LESS by Andrew Greer twice, and before our book club met yesterday. Initially, I played mind games with myself despite being intrigued by the concept of this novel. My second read, having ushered myself out of my mind, I enjoyed the humour and satire in the story following Arthur Less, a failed (according to Arthur) writer. While I was tempted to feel sorry for Arthur Less because his apparent inability to function in life, I found that was doing a disservice to himself. More than self-pity, he really seemed not to have accepted himself as a worthy human being. From the time he was a boy, when his father tried to ‘make a man’ of his son until, years later, his lover of nine years leaves him for another man, Arthur has seen himself in a rather shallow light. To avoid the pending marriage of his lover, he gathers any invitation he’s ever received to speak or teach, packs his bags and travels from New York across Europe in an effort to escape his life and ends back at home. The narrator of this humorous, but very real story, was obvious to many in my book group and in online reviews. Like Arthur, I just didn’t get it and it was revealed towards the end of the book. Another issue that occupied Arthur’s thoughts, besides the loss of his lover and his belief that he was failure as an author, was the fear of aging. Arthur's story is a love story and a coming of age story, pardon the pun. Laugh out loud scenes sparkle throughout this story. Humour so sly that I would almost miss it. Could it be because I don’t always get sly humour until I turn the page?

Always needing to see a philosophical point to a story, I was rewarded by Andrew Greer’s gentle, and humorous, description of the life of one gay man, living on the edge of the gay culture while at the same time being part of it. 

“But what I am trying to tell you (and I only have a moment), 

what I have been trying to tell you this whole time, 

is that from where I sit, the story of Arthur Less 

is not so bad. Because it is also mine.”

~ Andrew Sean Greer, LESS

Title: LESS

Author: Andrew Sean Greer

Copyright: 2017

Hardcover - 2017;

Paperback edition May 2018

Type: Novel 

Publisher: Hatchett Book Group, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-316-31612-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-0-316-31613-2 (pb)

Book design:  Sean Ford

Printed in the United States of America