A breakout romantic comedy by the best-selling author of five critically acclaimed novels.
Who says you can’t run away from your problems?
You are a failed novelist about to turn 50. 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?
Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: He will turn 50. Through it all there is his first love. And there is his last.
Because despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings, and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story.
A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author the New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical”, “elegiac”, and “ingenious” as well as “too sappy by half”, Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.
Clever and enjoyable The first chapter of the book struck me as a whinging litany of first world problems and I would have dropped the book had not my daughter insisted it was a good one. As the reader later discovers, the author seems to have had the same concern about his work, but … Arthur Less, The unprepossessing hero kept growing on me, first to raise my empathy and eventually to find our common humanity. Yes, the excellent stylist who is Andrew Sean Greer gets at times a little too clever for the good of…
Tender, wistful, funny Tender, funny, sometimes melancholy, written with beautiful language. I first read a chapter of the novel when it appeared as a short story in The New Yorker earlier this year. It was a tour de force of carefully managed absurdity, heartache, and wistful humor. The book is just as good (although its structural device perhaps goes on a bit too long — one country too many, maybe). Greer’s writing is masterful. He manages to be meaningful and funny at the same time, an incredible balancing act…
Less is More Arthur Less is hilariously well-named. In the opening salvo, he is waiting to be escorted to a literary event, sitting in a hotel lobby, while a woman he is meant to meet is circling the room looking for a woman, mistakenly thinking the author of the book she’s read cannot be a man. On the eve of Arthur’s fiftieth birthday, his partner of almost ten years has announced his upcoming nuptials, and in order to avoid this nightmare, Arthur has cobbled together a trip around the world accepting an…