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Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. There are ambivalent run-ins between Less and his estranged father as, still in pursuit of cash, he begins a lecture tour. Less’s odyssey also involves a roving theatre troupe who are staging one of his works. While an acidic wit in the vein of David Sedaris is ever present, Greer’s attention to the sublimity of the changing landscape – “the intricate tooled leatherwork of a mountainside … the varying bars of tangerine and coral that linger in the sky” – introduces softer notes. Travelling in Mandern’s RV, and accompanied by “crazy-ass” pug Dolly, Less passes through the Mojave desert to Santa Fe, up along the Mississippi, through Alabama and Georgia, to his home town and beyond. The notorious Mandern, “with his rock-star behaviour”, precipitates a madcap chain of events. However, as Greer notes, “fast turns Fortune’s wheel!” Things look up when Less is commissioned to write a lucrative profile of eccentric novelist HH Mandern – also featured in the first book – and heads to Palm Springs. Rehashing the formula of the first outing, Less is on a journey here too, after an unexpected death and financial oversights leave him in dire straits. Anxiety, as much as anything else, propels his picaresque progress through this road-trip novel. Less accepted that he could survive anything … to hell with doubt and worry.”īut “doubt and worry” can’t be jettisoned for long indeed, they are the pillars of Less’s characterisation. And yet, in those few minutes, as man and moose, they watched the setting sun, and Arthur Less felt chosen … when it left him. “For local detail and colour headed to a hot springs recommended by his lodge … He came upon the springs, peeled off his clothes and settled naked into the pool … very quietly but startlingly … an enormous moose came out of the forest, walked over and sat beside him in the pool … Less urinated freely in pure terror.

He recounts one of Arthur’s bizarre interludes early on, in the course of researching a travel piece. Our narrator, Freddy Palu, is Less’s boyfriend. Absurdity and playfulness are the crowd-pleasing hallmarks – and the same is largely true of the follow-up, Less Is Lost. Less bounces from Mexico to Morocco to India, jet-setting in a bid to distract himself from romantic turmoil back home. A ndrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 novel Less is a frenetic and often hilarious account of “minor American novelist” Arthur Less navigating zany twists of fate during a series of literary engagements across the globe.

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