Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novel 'Less' - An Intriguing Story of Transformation

Feli-Mar Barbero: Like it

Canada on Dec 07, 2023

Kermit80: Well written, but really predictable. A good and easy reading but nothing more than this. Average

Italy on Oct 07, 2023

G. Wallace: I want to be Author Less. More than that I want Arthur less to know himself. Do I know myself? Can we write in honesty if we don’t know ourselves in honesty?

Ok, I have homework. But I think I might be putting off my real life by picking accounting. It felt safe. I think I should have picked English…literature. A foreign language. How much have I kept picking because I was scared of what I really want to do. I want to write whether it’s like Author Less or not. I want to live life like Arthur Less.

United States on Sep 24, 2023

BookWorm: The premise of 'Less' is simple - the title character, Arthur Less, is an obscure author who is about to turn fifty. He's a quiet, gentle soul who drifts through life and has 'not developed a hard shell' in the words of the narrative. In order to avoid attending his ex-boyfriend's wedding, he accepts a rag-tag collection of invitations that send him on an eclectic round the world trip. The novel is the story of that trip and all that befalls Less on his travels, as well as flashbacks to his past.

It's gently humorous - I don't think it goes as far as farce, although some of the disasters that befall Less are close to it. It's funny without being hilarious. As you'd expect from a prize winning novel, the writing is clever and full of tricks and nice wording, but it is not pretentious. I enjoyed the way Greer expresses things and his insights and observations into life.

Despite the problems that Less encounters, there is still an overall positive and hopeful message about the book - it's not depressing. Less himself is a character you cannot help but like and eventually love. There's a warmth in the way the story is told - it's affectionate towards the characters and...

United Kingdom on Sep 20, 2023

Emilia Mori: Less è il libro più gradevole e divertente che abbia letto negli ultimi mesi.
Il protagonista, goffo ma non troppo, ingenuo ma non stupido, esce vincitore da varie lotte intestine nel mondo degli artisti gay statunitensi dopo varie avventure in paesi diversi descritti dall'autore con originalità e grande sense of humour.
Uno dei meriti di questo scrittore è di non essere mai troppo descrittivo nè volgare nelle scene intime fra i vari personaggi.

Italy on Aug 24, 2023

Books on our Brains Society/ Barbara: When you put four well-read, middle-aged, opinionated women together to discuss a book, it’s rare you get any kind of unanimity of opinion, but Less, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel, was the exception. We all rated it 5/5.
Many people, I think, fall into the trap of believing a “great” book cannot be funny. For a book to be considered worthy it must be ponderous and serious. It has to deal with “heavy’ issues. Well, Less deals with one of life’s heaviest issues: love. And it does so with humor.
Arthur Less, a gay novelist with a minor literary success to his credit, is about to turn 50, which is difficult enough, but he also has to deal with his former (much younger) lover’s marriage to someone else. Arthur can neither attend the wedding nor refuse to attend, so he searches through his collection of mail and takes out every invitation to a conference or award presentation he has received in the prior year and decides to accept them all. This takes him literally around the world to Mexico, Italy, France, Morocco, Japan, and India giving him an excuse not to have to see the love of his life say “I do” to someone else.
His travels bring him into contact...

United States on Aug 29, 2018

J. Ang: This year’s Pulitzer Prize winner has at its centre a middling middle-aged White American writer, Arthur Less, of a peripatetic novel, while he does just that literally, wandering round the globe to take up writerly duties, to escape his ex-lover’s wedding. This is an interesting piece of metafiction, as Greer writes about a writer (who may or may not be based on himself), and his troubling and somewhat comical relationship with the literary publishing world.

That Less is gay opens up a new arena of writerly issues, as Less feels he is accused of being one of the “assimilationists”, by a malevolent fellow writer, who makes a speech at a prize-giving event for which Less is a nominee in attendance. He elaborates that these assimilationists are “the ones who write the way straight people write, who hold up heterosexuals as war heroes, who make gay characters suffer, who set their characters adrift in a nostalgic past that ignores our present oppression”. And likewise, one wonders at the conundrum Greer himself faces as a gay literary writer, and how self-referential Less’s struggles are.

That said, Greer has no problems showing he is in full sympathy with...

United Kingdom on Jul 05, 2018

Ulysses Grant Dietz: “Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.”

Andrew Greer is a gifted writer and a skilled storyteller. I started reading this book with a good deal of cynical lip-curling over the precious fumbling of its title character, Arthur Less. My radar was attuned to every little bit of self-conscious “literariness,” that affectation of language through which an author separates him or herself from the herd of other writers. By the last page of the book, however, I was in tears. Somehow, Andrew Sean Greer’s feckless, nearly-fifty, aging-twink author protagonist began, against the odds, to resonate with me.

I am fifteen years older than Andrew Greer, and a decade older than the fictional Arthur Less. Why does this matter? Because age is not just a number: age is your place in history, your worldview, your experience. As a sixty-something gay man, with a husband of forty-two years, the experience of my life gives me a point of view, for good or for ill. I have opinions, especially about other gay men, and particularly about gay men in the public spotlight.

And there, you see, is part of the point. “Less” is a gay book by...

United States on May 31, 2018