Less

Arthur Less, a middling gay novelist nearing fifty, flees the sting of his younger lover Freddy's departure by accepting every literary invitation abroad: a panel in Mexico City; a teaching stint in Paris; a sci-fi convention in Berlin; a camel trek in Morocco; a retreat in India; a cherry-blossom idyll in Kyoto. This picaresque itinerary, narrated with Greer's signature drollery, mirrors Less's inner disarray—a man forever 'less' than his ex, the celebrated poet Douglas; less than his own ambitions; less, somehow, than the sum of his earnest failures. Greer structures the novel as a third-person memoir, zipping through locales with rhythmic precision, each stop a fresh humiliation or half-formed epiphany that nudges Less toward self-awareness without granting him full clarity.

What animates Less beyond its jaunty travelogue is Greer's compassionate lens on midlife's absurdities; Arthur is no hapless fool but a figure of quiet pathos, his loneliness etched in small gestures—like rewriting a rejected novel in stolen hours or bonding with Zohra, a lesbian playwright mirroring his romantic exile, over Sahara sands. The voice—patient, archly observant—deploys em-dashes to capture Less's tumbling thoughts: 'He is fifty; he is not getting younger; he has wasted his life.' Dialogues sparkle with ironic reversals, as when Less, mistaken for a bigger name, fumbles through pretensions he half-believes.

Formally, Greer does something sly: the novel's circularity—beginning and ending in San Francisco, with Freddy's shadow looming—mimics Less's avoidance, building to a triumphant return not through grand revelation but incremental grace. Encounters with expat gay circles and spectral figures from Less's past (his ex-mentor Marian; the dying critic Brownburn) underscore themes of longing amid disconnection, yet Greer's touch remains light, favoring humor over pathos. It's a book that performs its protagonist's evasion while gently corralling him—and us—toward reckoning.

For all its charms, Less falters in its relentless episodism; the global jaunts, while vividly rendered, blur into a checklist of comic set-pieces—Mexico's indigestion, Berlin's bathhouse blunder, India's silent ashram—diluting cumulative emotional weight. Greer's prose, though precise, occasionally strains for whimsy, as in Less's camel-bound debate with Zohra, where philosophical musings on love feel patly symmetrical rather than earned. This scattershot momentum; while suiting the picaresque form, leaves Freddy's absence—a pivotal void—more motif than fully fleshed ache, rendering the ending's tenderness moving but not shattering.

By journey's end, Less has changed subtly; readers, too, emerge with a wry affection for this flawed everyman, his triumphs humble yet real. Greer proves adept at wedding structure to theme—the novel's forward momentum enacting Less's flight, its quiet returns his growth—crafting a satire that honors vulnerability. In an era of blustery memoirs, Less offers a model of gentle truth-telling; Arthur Less may be 'less,' but his story, compassionate and true, is anything but.