Emma Beddington

Back on the road: Less is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed

The hapless protagonist of Greer’s prizewinning novel, Less, is now touring America’s heartlands in an unexpected flurry of paid work

Andrew Sean Greer, photographed in San Francisco in 2018. [Getty Images]

Get ready for more of Less: Andrew Sean Greer’s hapless novelist is back on the road. First things first: you need to have read Less, Greer’s Pulitzer-winning first outing for his creation, to appreciate this slighter but equally charming sequel. That’s no hardship. Less was hilarious and humane: a hymn to second acts. In it, Arthur Less – a tentative, faded Battenberg blond-and-pink man, around whom embarrassments and misunderstandings coalesce – scuttled across the world to avoid facing his 50th birthday and the wedding of his long-time lover Freddy to someone else, both imminent.

In Less is Lost, Arthur has a stranger and scarier destination for a West Coast homosexual: America’s heartlands. He’s trying to avoid losing the ‘Shack’, his San Francisco home, by cashing in on an unexpected flurry of paid work: writing a profile, visiting a theatre troupe, judging a literary prize and delivering a lecture tour.

‘Some business lunch! I took you to a restaurant.’

There are many familiar faces. This time, H.H.H. Mandern, the eccentric sci-fi novelist with a fanatical following, coerces Less into a quixotic road trip in an RV called Rosina. Robert Brownburn, Arthur’s former lover, poet and Pulitzer-winner (how neat!), remains a powerful presence, and absence. Freddy – back with Arthur but also quite cross with him about the Shack and other matters – narrates, somewhere between tenderness and exasperation, as he did Less. Various others, and their words and actions, resurface along the way.

That’s why this is a book for ‘Lessologists’ (a coinage of Freddy’s). It’s a sequel for those who are already sold, referencing and reprising what made the original so winning. There’s slightly less on the minor humiliations of the ‘Minor American Novelist’, which I think is wise, avoiding the in-jokiness of anecdotes about readings and author Q and As.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in