Literary Fiction · LightA minor novelist turning fifty accepts every invitation abroad to avoid his ex's wedding
Less
A novelist about to turn fifty dodges his ex's wedding by accepting every invitation abroad
Arthur Less is a novelist approaching fifty. When his boyfriend of nine years announces that he is engaged to someone else, Arthur avoids the awkward wedding by accepting a string of invitations to literary events abroad. His travels take him through Paris, Berlin, Morocco, southern India and a desert island in the Arabian Sea, where he comes face to face with the person he most wants to avoid. A comic and bittersweet novel about lost chances and growing older.
More about this book
Who
Arthur Less, a gay writer of middling success who is known mostly for an old relationship with an older, Pulitzer-winning poet. He is forty-nine and dreading his fiftieth birthday. His latest novel has just been rejected by his publisher, and his former boyfriend Freddy Pelu has invited him to his wedding.
World
It opens in San Francisco. To avoid the wedding, Arthur accepts every literary engagement he would normally turn down, and the trip takes him abroad, through Paris, Berlin, Morocco and India.
What makes it different
Greer began it as a very serious novel, then found that the only way to write about being gay and growing older was to make it funny. The result is a satire about romantic love, relationships, aging and travel.
Feel
Comic and bittersweet. It won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became a New York Times bestseller. A sequel, Less Is Lost, followed in 2022.