Less - Andrew Sean Green

[goodreads]

Title: Less
Author: Andrew Sean Green
Genre: Fiction
Rating: 2.5/5
# pages: 273
Date read: September, 2018

You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. 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 fifty. 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.


I almost gave up on this book a LOT of times. But every time I considered it, I picked it up to "just read a few more pages, to make sure it's the right decision" and found something to convince me to give it a second chance.

So in the end I finished it... even if it did take me almost two months.

I can definitely see why it won a Pulitzer Prize. Objectively speaking, it was clearly very well written. But quite honestly, that's probably exactly why I didn't care for it. The writing style didn't work for me, but seemed pretentious rather than literary, and Arthur Less came across as having the spine of a wet noodle and as somebody who had things happen to him, rather than actually take any charge himself. Even his trip around the world was because of invitations from others, rather than through any deliberate choices he made himself. And unfortunately the ending really didn't work for me - perhaps because that again was something that happened to him, rather than him actually stepping out and taking action. Did he learn anything during the course of his trip? I'm not convinced.

Why did I keep reading it then? Fortunately there were aspects I enjoyed. I enjoyed reading about his stay in Germany and his aborted trip across the desert and I found his antics in airports amusing and relatable. (It is NOT a travelogue though, and shouldn't be mistaken for one). So I'm glad I stuck with it, but it's not a book I'm likely to recommend to others, and even less likely to reread.