It's a summer day, and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.
He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.
The narrator, describing Arthur Less
Less is a 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Andrew Sean Greer. It is a story about a writer who is about to turn fifty and receives an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding. To avoid going, he accepts several invitations to literary events around the world, resulting in a story that is by turns funny, sappy, miserable, and lyrical.
Less himself (scorchingly described by a poet as being "like a man without skin") serves as both a satire of a somewhat hapless American abroad, and as a deeply relatable figure no matter what one's background is. As the story follows Arthur's journey across the world, he tries to avoid dealing with the heartbreak that sent him on the trip to begin with, and instead deals with the passing of time, the coming and going of love, and what it means to be the fool of your own narrative.
A comic, yet moving (and often shamelessly sappy) novel, Less received considerable recognition for the Fitzgerald-adjacent prose and for the surprising power of such a tender, softhearted love story.
Less provides examples of:
- Allegorical Character: Less is an affectionate pastiche of the typical “clumsy American” abroad, and serves as the vehicle for the novel’s exploration of this trope. His journey around the world is complicated by recurring travel issues, like abrupt flight changes, language and cultural barriers, and run-ins with border officers.
- All Gays are Promiscuous: Present, but justified. While the story does involve many one-night stands and sexcapades, the author goes out of his way to humanize all of the gay men that have more than a sentence's worth of characterization.
- For example, Bastian is a young Bavarian man that Arthur begins sleeping with while he is in Germany for five weeks. While they both understand that the relationship will end when Arthur moves to the next leg of his trip, there are moments of genuine (and often quiet tender) connection between them.
- This trope is also indirectly deconstructed by Less a few times. Once, he ruminates on the nature of being one of very, very few gay men to survive the AIDS crisis, and part of his Inner Monologue is spent wondering what older gay couples are supposed to do, exactly. As men who survived AIDS, they have no examples of married life in a gay relationship: before the modern day, gay people couldn't live openly, and as they started to gain the right to do so, AIDS killed thousands.
- Amicable Exes: Robert and Arthur, and Robert and his ex-wife.
- Camp Gay: Arthur, and he knows it.[after a woman hugs Arthur and apologizes for "whatever happened to him" that made him weep at a play]
Arthur: Nothing happened to me, he wanted to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I'm just a homosexual at a Broadway show. - Cast Full of Gay: There are dozens of minor characters in Less, but the vast majority of the ones Arthur interacts with in a meaningful way are gay or bisexual.
- Character Narrator: Although it's not clear which character until near the end.
- Gayngst: Both invoked in the meditation on what it means to be a single, gay man in his late forties, and deconstructed when another author tells Arthur his work hasn't been recognized as part of the "gay canon" because it has too much of this.Finley: It's not because you're a bad author. It's because you're a bad gay. It is our duty to show something beautiful from our world. The gay world. But in your books, you make the characters suffer without reward. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were Republican.
Arthur: *Stunned Silence*
Arthur: ...A bad gay? - Kissing Under the Influence: At a party in Paris, Arthur meets a man named Javier, and after several drinks they wind up making out for a while.
- Lemony Narrator
- Love Triangle: Arthur has a few pages of minor panic when he learns that his long-term partner's former wife is scheduled to speak at the same event that he is.
- Lover and Beloved: In the past, Arthur and his lover, the famous poet Robert Brownburn. In the less distant past, Freddy Pelu is this to Arthur.
- Lost Wedding Ring: Arthur loses his wedding ring in a grocery store, although it happened long before gay marriage was legal, so technically it wasn't a wedding ring.
- May–December Romance: Robert Brownburn is in his mid-forties when he starts seeing 21-year-old Arthur Less, and Arthur himself is 15 years older than Freddy.
- Meaningful Name: Less’s first name, Arthur, sounds a lot like “author.”
- One-Word Title: Surname of Protagonist Title.
- Protagonist Title: Surname as One-Word Title.
- Socially Awkward Hero: Arthur. He constantly second-guesses himself in almost everything he does (wearing a leather jacket to a Parisian party, commenting on a conversation, not asking Freddy to stay with him), gets tongue-tied easily, and his anxious politeness often gets in the way of his needs.Narrator: Because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.
- Survivor's Guilt: Implied with Arthur, for surviving AIDS when so many men he knew didn't.
- The Twink: Freddy.
- Arthur when he was a young man (and arguably when he's a middle-aged man, too.)
