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'Less' offers more in Andrew Sean Greer's follow-up to his Pulitzer-winning novel

Maureen Corrigan

Less is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer Little, Brown hide caption

Why do we underrate comedy when we need it so badly? When Andrew Sean Greer's novel Less won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 there was a dismissive shrug on the part of some critics. After all, the Pulitzer is usually awarded to a novel that's not as much fun to read as Less was.

A satire of the pretensions of the literary world, Less chronicled the efforts of its hero — the white, gay, American, minor writer, Arthur Less — to outrun his impending 50th birthday and the wedding of his former partner by accepting every invitation to every literary conference, junket, writer's retreat and festival that came his way. Naturally, when news of a sequel to Less was announced, more dismissive shrugging ensued, as though no one remembered acclaimed sequels written by the likes of John Updike , Philip Roth and Hilary Mantel .

Less is Lost picks up with Arthur Less now living with that aforementioned partner, Freddy Pelu, who left his new husband to return to Less. You'd think that demonstration of love would be enough, but Less is a chronically uncertain person, prone to what Freddy, who acts as our occasional narrator, calls a "clumsiness of the heart." The death here of Less' first love, the famous poet Robert Brownburn, only deepens Less's uncertainty, since it turns out that Less owes a decade of back rent on the San Francisco bungalow he's been living in that was owned by Brownburn.

Fortunately, for a writer so minor he's often confused with another minor writer of the same name (even though the other guy is African American), Less has lately been receiving a strangely high number of invitations for lucrative literary gigs — public lectures, glossy writing assignments, and the like. So Less hits the road again — this time in the U.S. Both he and Freddy assume that a separation may clarify their relationship.

Less' first assignment is in Palm Springs, where he'll write a profile of the science fiction writer H.H.H. Mandern, who appeared in the first novel. Here's Greer's skewering description of Mandern:

A bestselling author since his first book, Incubus , came out in 1978 ... H.H. H. Mandern instantly became a towering figure in the world of books, with ... his striped Vincent Price beard ... [and] rock-star behavior such as  ... setting money on fire. ... But nothing stopped his output: a novel, sometimes two a year, and not just any novels but six-hundred-page portraits of interstellar war and alien empire-building that would take a normal human being a year just to type ."

Mandern, always cranky, uses the profile as a bargaining chip to make Less drive him and his pug dog in a decrepit camper van through the Mojave desert for a reunion with his estranged daughter. Thus begins a travelogue through the West and South where, among other misadventures, Less is repeatedly greeted by the proprietors of RV parks with variations on this question, here asked by a lady in Louisiana:

"Now, you're not from around here are you, honey?" ... "No. ..." [answers Less] "See, I thought from how you sounded, you was from the Netherlands.

Less, we're told, "knows what this means. ... and he has never known what to say. Because the question [this woman] is really asking, without at all knowing she is asking it, without meaning anything in the world except that she detects a linguistic flourish, is Are you a homosexual ?"

The question you may well be asking at this point is: Is Less Is Lost as good, as funny, as poignant as its predecessor? To which I would happily answer: Yes, at least!

There are extended comic passages here about Less' Walloon ancestry and a mediocre gay men's chorus singing Leonard Cohen songs that I read aloud, laughing, to anyone I could waylay. But comedy also arises out of pain and Greer smoothly transitions into the profound, such as in this rumination by Less about the empty encounter he has on the trip with his long-lost father:

The moment holds neither disappointment nor delight. Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love — because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.

Greer has said in interviews that this sequel is the end of Less. That would be a shame. Greer should add even more to Less' saga and take him as far as he can go.

Review: ‘Less Is Lost,’ sequel to a Pulitzer winner, finds a path to both satire and tears

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Less Is Lost

By Andrew Sean Greer Little, Brown: 272 pages, $29 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Andrew Sean Greer surprised a lot of observers when he won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his 2017 novel, “Less.” Comic novels generally don’t do well on the major awards circuit. (Ask Gary Shteyngart or Nell Zink , Sam Lipsyte and so on.) But “Less” was exceedingly well made, a witty tale about Arthur Less, a middle-age, insecure, weak-selling gay literary novelist who hits the eject button on his life after a breakup to take a whirlwind trip around the world. Coincidentally, among the targets of Greer’s gentle ribbing was the Pulitzer Prize itself. “You win a prize, and it’s all over,” a poet tells Arthur. “You lecture for the rest of your life. But you never write again.”

The punch line there was that Arthur desperately wanted to win one of those prizes anyway. And it’s a pretty good punch line now, because Greer not only won the Pulitzer but has in fact written again. “ Less Is Lost ” is a familiar-feeling sequel to its predecessor, which seems to bode ill for its prospects. But if Greer is just reapplying the “Less” formula — insecure, weak-selling, whirlwind trip, etc. — it’s one that allows for plenty of invention and flexibility. Take an uncertain man, a “middle-aged gay white novelist nobody’s ever heard of,” and put him in a host of places he’s uncomfortable in, especially when he’s uncomfortable everywhere, and some amount of hilarity is bound to ensue. Early on we are promised “a donkey, a pug, a whale, and a moose.” In due time the full menagerie arrives.

This time, Less’ travels are restricted to the United States, with Arthur making a mad cross-country dash as privation chases his heels. After the death of his former longtime lover Robert, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Arthur learns that probate court is dunning him for years of back rent in Robert’s San Francisco home. So he’s compelled to take gigs that are respectable but a tick diminishing for a would-be famous author: judging a literary prize; writing a magazine profile in the Southwest; supervising a musical version of one of his stories in the Southeast; taking a speaking tour up the Atlantic coast.

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An identity crisis and deadline pressure will make a writer do funny things, and soon Arthur is roped into an RV trip with a George R.R. Martin -esque writer who’s searching for his daughter. In the process, Arthur unwittingly takes a hallucinogen, plays a lead role in a water-based catastrophe and once again deploys his painfully mediocre German, one of the best items in Greer’s joke bag. Confronted with a group of German nudists, Arthur becomes flustered. “Also shy I am!” he offers lamely. Told they’re talking about breakups, his phrase-book German can’t match the subject he knows best. “Here is a sad conversation,” he tries.

Sad conversation he has, often. Shy he is — entertainingly so. But the truly remarkable thing about “Less” winning the Pulitzer isn’t that it’s a comedy; it is that, at heart, it’s a romance, a genre that faces an even rougher road with prize juries. All the globetrotting in “Less” set a path toward a happily ever after. A similar story is at play in “Less Is Lost,” as Arthur wends his way from San Francisco to Maine, where his beloved, Freddy, is teaching. The RV he drives is nicknamed Rosina, a name that echoes Rocinante, the steed Don Quixote rode in search of his Dulcinea.

The sequel is also thick with matters of love, family and home — when it takes a break from its various face-plants, misunderstandings and yes, that moose. Arthur is striving to reconnect not just with Freddy but also with his long-absent father. In that context, every gag, misstep and line of clumsy German serves the themes of loss and recovery, from the sweater in Arthur’s luggage that’s torn to bits by an electric razor to America itself. “America, how’s your marriage ?” Greer writes. “Your two-hundred-fifty-year-old promise to stay together in sickness and in health? ... Who betrayed whom, in the end? I hear you tried getting sober. That didn’t last, did it?”

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Amid all this, Arthur struggles with the question of what makes him lovable — and if not his writing, then what is it? (A late plot twist in the novel cleverly complicates this question.) That sense of self can be hard on people surrounding a writer, as Freddy — the novel’s actual narrator — points out. “There may be writers whose imaginations are so fertile, they merely plant the seeds and water them regularly, and a novel blooms every year or so — and lucky are those authors’ partners. But all the other writers, it seems, must provide their own manure.”

To extend the metaphor, Arthur generates a lot of muck. What makes his novels funny is Greer’s understanding of how absurdly writers will contort their psyches to feel like they count, like they’re loved. (That’s why it’s better that Less himself isn’t the narrator; it would read as crushingly heartsick, if not a tick mad.) These contortions are also what make the books poignant. The tricky part is balancing the two modes via tone, style and plot. Greer’s task is to ground the absurdity in tenderheartedness without being cute or cloying. In that regard, he masters both — the embarrassing moment but also the gentle grace note — as when he captures the bereft mood of a wake: “Through the window, piano music steals in softly and, finding nothing worth taking, steals back out again and goes silent.”

Early on, Arthur is told by his former lover, the Pulitzer-winning poet, a kind of secret for success, both as a writer and as a person: “Pay attention. ... That’s all you need to do. Pay attention.” The punch line there is that the world is so full of distractions that Arthur misses the opportunity to do that, or finds himself paying attention to the wrong things. That leads to the moments of misdirection that are the lifeblood of funny novels. But trying to pay attention is touching too: Like writing a novel or finding a happy place to call home, it’s hard, worthy work.

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Andrew Sean Greer’s Less Is Lost : A Love Letter to a Gentler America—with a Big Finale

The follow-up to the Pulitzer-winning “Less” delights in the absurd and the mundane.

Andrew Sean Greer’s new novel performs an astonishing magic trick: It makes you forget the state of the world—or, more specifically, America.

In Less Is Lost, we return to Arthur Less, “our Minor American Novelist,” and his partner, Freddy Pelu, with whom he’s spent nine months of “unmarital bliss” on top of the nine years they’ve known each other. This is a story, we are told, of a crisis in their lives: how to keep choosing each other when the freshness of love has, if not soured, perhaps staled. In the midst of this crisis, the death of Less’s ex-lover throws the couple into financial distress, forcing Less to accept a series of improbable literary opportunities across the U.S. in order to keep their home.

Writers may take special pleasure in Less Is Lost for the way it holds a mirror to the unique humiliations of their vocation. (At one point Less is asked to “open” for a delayed, famous sci-fi author, whose fans interrupt Less’s attempts to read by chanting the other author’s name.) But with the wit and warmth that made readers fall in love with Less, Greer can find the absurd in everything. A literary prize committee, of which Less is a part, “is never to meet in person; their meetings are incorporeal, like those of angels.” In Dolly, the black pug who accompanies Less for much of his journey, Less recognizes himself—in her passionate effort to shape her towel into a bed each night, she is a fellow artist (“though more successful in her chosen field”).

What made Less such a deep joy to read was the voice—a playful almost-omniscience that occasionally shifted to reveal a mysterious first-person who looked upon Less with unmistakable fondness. That narrative voice resumes seamlessly in Less Is Lost , with Freddy introducing himself early, then weaving in and out of the story: “Now it is my turn to be uncertain . What other infelicities has Less hidden, forgotten, mislaid? What future is there with such a man?”

Though Freddy himself is physically absent for most of the novel, his voice is what gives the book its life, and his central dilemma is the lens through which the story is told. At times he invites us into Less’s consciousness (begging the question of how much of the story is faithfully reported—by Less to Freddy and by Freddy to us—and how much is imagined, reconstructed…and whether it matters). Other times, the narration pulls back: “How long can a gay man survive in the desert? We are about to find out, for, from our buzzard’s-eye view of California, we see an old conversation van painted a pristine shade of green tottering through the night through the Mojave Desert.” And still other times it shifts to second-person, with direct addresses to either the reader or to Less: “Sleep well, my love. More than a continent lies between us tonight.”

Off-screen, Freddy is nursing his hurt at Less’s description of their relationship— uncertain . When he addresses Less in the narration, there is both a hopeful blurring of boundaries between them and a reminder of our separateness from those we love. Less can no more hear Freddy’s commentary than someone in a horror move can hear the viewer shouting, “Look behind you!” Yet the very act of constructing this story can only be an act of love: “that magical spot where the rivers meet, a tessellated surface not unlike a backgammon board where the clear and muddy waters coexist but refuse to mix.”

Less Is Lost is a love story, but it’s also about how we make art—which is to say, how we make meaning: of ourselves, each other, our lives. At his ex-lover’s funeral, Less encounters a Czech editor who praises the poet’s “Beckett sensibility. That things are broken, in shards, that being human means nothing , that memory is nothing , that love is nothing. ” Less tells the editor he’s got it all wrong. And indeed, the novel feels like an indictment against this very sensibility.

Less’s road trip is characterized by moments of deep human connection, subversion of stereotypes, and jaw-dropping natural descriptions. (Joshua trees are “Holy rollers at a revival, lifting their heavy arms. How long has this been going on? For all time? Why did no one tell him?”) In the South, where Freddy warns Less they “kill queers” and “being white might not be enough,” Less dons a handlebar mustache and affixes half a dozen American flags to his conversion van. But Less encounters only kindness, which won’t feel realistic to every reader. Then again, our narrator notes, “Well, my darling, the world is so constructed that men like you will always end up safe in bed. Almost always.”

“Pay attention,” Less’s ex-lover instructed Less when his mother died. “You have to write it down. You have to use it later.” Less is enraged at the idea of using his mother’s death as a writing exercise, but he is reminded, “It’s not for yourself. It’s for someone seven hundred years from now.”

Greer pays attention. And if it’s painful for him, as it is for Less, he also transmutes it into something that may survive the next 700 years: “the restorative tonic of a funny tale.” In times like these, that feels like a gift.

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Review: 'Less Is Lost,' by Andrew Sean Greer

FICTION: Andrew Sean Greer's accomplished sequel to "Less" maps a cross-country odyssey filled with hijinks.

By Hamilton Cain

While scarcely an original observation, actor Sir Michael Caine still nailed it in 2017 when he said, "Comedy is harder to do than drama. You can make anyone burst into tears, but trying to get a laugh is murder." I recalled this truism as I read Andrew Sean Greer's technically accomplished, wildly entertaining "Less Is Lost , " the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "Less." Like its predecessor, the new novel is a feat of wit and brio, tougher than it looks.

In "Less" the middle-aged protagonist stared down his demons — and his former boyfriend's impending nuptials — by exiting east, New York to Europe to Africa to Japan, accepting invitations to conferences, literary retreats and a lucrative magazine profile.

"Less Is Lost" picks up just months later. After the taxing death of his friend and first lover, an elderly poet, Arthur faces a mountain of debt. He could lose his homey San Francisco apartment. He reverts to a familiar strategy: he'll canvass the nation for paychecks in a camper named Rosina, accompanied by a pug, Dolly, only now within "this foreign world, his own country."

Arthur treks across three time zones to a Maine rendezvous with his partner, Freddy Pelu, an academic (who'd called off his wedding). From his New England perch, Freddy narrates hilarious, cinematic scenes that include affectionate if campy portraits of Arthur: "Look at his thinning hair wind-whipped into the stiff peak of a blond meringue, his delicate lips, sharpened nose, and elongated chin recalling Viking invaders of the Bayeux Tapestry, as white as a white man can get."

Greer's a master of the picaresque, deftly moving his protagonist from a seedy, David Lynch-esque desert bar through the flatlands of Texas to a Southern theater troupe. In his native Delaware, Less' sister awaits him, possibly with the father who abandoned them both, and, farther north, his partner. But will Freddy embrace Less?

Greer's wordplay is glorious: He drop-shots puns and ripostes, firing up his prose. (One bit of dialogue pays homage to the iconic Abbott and Costello routine, "Who's on First?") Less speaks German, perhaps not as fluently as he believes; Greer translates a laugh-out-loud encounter with German tourists at a hot springs in Arizona.

Is "Less Is Lost," then, greater than, lesser than, or equal to "Less?" Is more of Less less or more? The jokes write themselves, which may be a problem here: Greer is not only winking at the reader, he's winking at himself. Although an agile stylist, he's captivated by the cadences of his own voice, the web of Less' relationships, and an unpersuasive reckoning.

The author's gifts are manifold, though, and "Less Is Lost" finds its path, holding tight to a Kerouac-like exuberance even as Less falls short of the enlightenment he seeks. And despite the novel's self-conscious moments, Greer bears down on his character's quest with a command of craft second to none. Will love conquer all? As Freddy notes, "Well, reader, I will simply let you guess."

A contributing books editor for Oprah Daily, Hamilton Cain reviews for the Star Tribune, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn.

Less Is Lost

By: Andrew Sean Greer.

Publisher: Little, Brown, 272 pages, $29.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, less is lost.

When I reviewed Andrew Sean Greer’s LESS in 2017, I noted a certain similarity to John Updike’s books about peripatetic novelist Henry Bech. And now, after winning the Pulitzer Prize for its predecessor, Greer has strengthened that comparison by sending his protagonist, “Minor American Novelist” Arthur Less, on another odyssey, this time from sea to sea across the United States. While it’s too early to predict if LESS IS LOST will win any prizes, it’s another captivating blend of wry humor and emotional insight that makes for an equally pleasurable reading experience.

Less, “a middle-aged gay white novelist nobody’s ever heard of” who shares his name with a Black writer (the pair of them, in the judgment of bookstores “both too unknown for General Fiction”), unexpectedly finds himself on the receiving end of some welcome attention. The invitations that land in his inbox include a request that he serve on the jury for a major literary prize and an announcement from a group in the Deep South that it wants to mount a theatrical performance of one of his short stories.

"As he did in LESS, Greer ends this heartfelt sequel with a pleasing twist. It’s one of the novel’s appealing qualities that make one hope he might have more journeys planned for his protagonist."

But before Less can savor the sudden demand for his presence, he must deal with a more pressing concern: his impending eviction from the San Francisco bungalow he shared for 15 years with famed poet Robert Brownburn, 25 years his senior, and now occupies with his much younger partner, Freddy Pelu. Freddy is the novel’s narrator, a high school English teacher who’s writing from his vantage point in Maine, where he’s decamped for a writing conference. Brownburn has just died, and although he allowed Less to dwell in the “Shack” (as it’s affectionately known) after their breakup, the late poet’s ex-wife and executor of his estate informs Less on the day of his former lover’s funeral that he’s now on the hook for 10 years of back rent, due in 30 days.

Less’s financial straits launch him on an odyssey into the Mojave Desert with octogenarian science fiction writer H. H. H. Mandern and his black pug, Dolly, in Mandern’s bright green camper van nicknamed Rosina. He’s accompanying the decidedly more famous writer for a magazine profile that will earn him some quick, desperately needed cash. But after Mandern departs, Less heads eastward for Louisiana in Rosina, with Dolly as his companion, to connect with the traveling theater troupe that’s dramatizing his short story, based on his father’s abandonment when he was a child. He’s been told that an unknown benefactor will provide a generous stipend to him for the right to perform the story. A cryptic note from his estranged father stirs his imagination into believing that the senior Less is the mysterious financial supporter.

On the road through a vividly evoked desert Southwest and verdant Southland, “our hero” (as Freddy frequently refers to him) grapples with memories of his childhood in Delaware, a place he likens to “trying to describe an airplane meal you had a half century ago,” and his fears that Freddy may be on the verge of abandoning him for another man, especially after informing him in a phone call that “something needs to change between us.” For all its comic moments, these struggles give the novel a resonance that serves to make it much more than a manic romp.

Less’ encounters with an assortment of quirky characters and his occasional mishaps along the road tend toward the mild side. However, Greer’s consistently keen perception, easy wit and lively prose make for an enjoyable but meaningful trip, one that’s easy to imagine taking cinematic form someday. He skillfully captures his protagonist’s persistent unease as he traverses a part of the country that doesn’t seem especially hospitable, even as it “feels ordinary to Arthur Less not to belong.”

LESS IS LOST is peppered with piquant observations on the craft of fiction and the state of American society. Less, once told by a fellow writer that he’s a “bad gay,” endures a lecture from a Czech editor who tells him that the “problem with American writers” is that “you are all New Yorkers.” As Freddy describes him, in a tone that’s equal parts affection and exasperation, Less possesses an almost childlike optimism that’s a mirror of his country’s, “a mindset so UnitedStatesian you could serve it with ketchup.”

As he did in LESS, Greer ends this heartfelt sequel with a pleasing twist. It’s one of the novel’s appealing qualities that make one hope he might have more journeys planned for his protagonist. If they’re as entertaining as his latest, he can be sure that many readers will be happy to join him for what certainly will be a delightful ride.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg on September 28, 2022

Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

• Publication Date: June 27, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Humor
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• ISBN-10: 0316498912
• ISBN-13: 9780316498913

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The Queer Review

Book Review: Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer ★★★★

Arthur Less is back. The titular star of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Less , is being put through the emotional ringer once more by his author Andrew Sean Greer and the results are the same. But the same isn’t a bad thing when you’re talking about a bestselling, universally praised, gay comedy drama with a slew of awards including, you know, the aforementioned Pulitzer!

Fate has conspired to throw Arthur Less’ life a curveball and our eternally bewildered protagonist is sent out on the road with a beloved and cantankerous fantasy author, H.H.H. Mandern, in order to save the home he’s built with his lover Freddy. Less has to change, and as a white gay man in his 50s, he is resisting. Criss-crossing the country, from literary gig to literary gig, Less transforms, just not in the ways he anticipated.

Early on in the book, Less is asked a question, “What if we’re wrong?… What if the whole idea of America is wrong?” He is then thrust out into the middle of it, unprepared and under-resourced to see for himself. With little more than a single suit and a desperate need to succeed, Less is put into more and more bizarre situations—a gay fish, very much out of his water—that test him physically, emotionally, and perhaps spiritually.

Whereas the first book explored Arthur’s desire for love, and his insecurity over his own worth, Less is Lost starts to dig into his love life after the big rom-com moment. Less is older, probably not much wiser, and facing thoughts of mortality all around him. Ex-lovers, his father, and Mandern all bring up questions about what we owe to each other, what family is, and whether been we’ve been overlooking the beauty all around us.

Arthur Less is still the charming, ridiculous, wounded mess of a human that readers fell in love with back in 2017. He is still discovering himself, filled with self-deprecating wit and a beguiling lack of self-awareness (his overly-confident, but mangled attempts at speaking German are a joy to read). As one character tells him; “You may not know it, Arthur Less, but you’re full of adventure. You’re a reckless man.” If in 2017 we lived vicariously through Arthur’s desperate adventures, fleeing America for Europe (and in 2017 who didn’t want to flee America), the Arthur of 2022 is forced to stay and face America as it is, and to find his peace on home soil.

The spark that filled the original Less with such joy and relatable anxiety is here in abundance. It’s safe to say if you loved the first book, you’ll enjoy this one too. Greer has created a sequel that succeeds in doing what we all want from a sequel. The same but not the same. Different without being different. Going deeper without troubling the foundations.

Less is Lost is, unsurprisingly, a sweet return to the arms of a lover who knows you better than you know yourself. It’s a joy to be back here again, and if the book suffers at all, it’s only from the fact that we’re already familiar with the excellence of the writing and the character and our expectations are so much higher this time around. I would happily keep reading Arthur Less’ escapades for years to come.

By Chad Armstrong

Less is Lost is published on Tuesday, September 20th 2022. Pre-order/order now from your local independent bookstore .

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Yipee ki-yay, motherbooker

Swearing, rants, reviews, on every level, book review – less is lost by andrew sean greer.

I absolutely fell in love with Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel Less . I constantly recommend it to friends and suggest it every month in my book club. I just believed that everyone should and would enjoy reading it. Okay, not everyone but a lot of people. It’s also my main piece of evidence to throw into the ring every time somebody says “Literary Fiction is just depressing and dark”. Less was anything but dark. It is the opposite of dark and I’ve been obsessed with ever since. So I was genuinely delighted that there was a sequel coming. I wanted to spend more time with Arthur Less and couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy. Unfortunately, I didn’t get around to it in 2022 when it was released. Instead, I figured I would start the year off on a positive note and make it my first book of 2023. Would it be as good as the first book? Or would it be a tricky second album?

 Andrew Sean Greer’s prize-winning novel  Less  was so charming and enjoyable to read that it felt unfair to the other books. It’s the kind of book that I haven’t been able to get out of my head and will never stop recommending to people. Things that all meant that I was both very excited about the sequel and worried that it wouldn’t be able to live up to my expectations. However, my love for the character Arthur Less was so strong that I knew I had to read it. What has been happening to the author and his partner Freddy since we last saw them?

Life is seemingly pretty blissful for the pair as they live contentedly in their shared home, the “Shack”. That is until Arthur’s ex-boyfriend, Robert, dies and Less suddenly owes an awful lot in back rent. As Freddy is away for work, Arthur takes on the burden of this debt and agrees to several work opportunities. Just like in the first book, he finds himself on a journey that offers financial gain but, unexpectedly, also provides emotional gains. Instead of travelling the world, we are now driving across America in an RV with a revolving supporting cast that includes a famous science-fiction writer and his pug. Can Arthur make the money in time? What will his absence mean for his relationship with Freddy?

On the surface,  Less is Lost  is just a continuation of the previous novel. It has a very similar vibe and the story is fairly similar. Something that I really didn’t mind because of how good the first one was. However, the second book also introduces us to several different and important topics. We learn more about Arthur’s childhood and his relationship with his family. Throughout his journey, Less finds himself sticking out because of his sexuality and we see the discomfort he feels surrounding his own identity. A return to his hometown summons up memories of school bullies and name-calling. It’s nice to see that same the anxiety-ridden writer is still alive and well despite finding happiness at the end of the previous book.

Less is Lost  is another absolute triumph and a joy to read. It is a constantly funny and bizarre odyssey narrated by Freddy himself. There are so many unforgettable situations and characters to meet along the way. It’s also nice to see so many familiar faces from the first book. Greer so easily captures the changing landscape of Less’ journey and brings a delicacy to cut through his wit. Alongside the comedy, this is an incredibly poignant book. There are plenty of emotional scenes and moments of self-discovery. The book also attempts to explore post-Trump America and the tension that exists everywhere. Although I have to say, this side of it is quickly pushed to one side in favour of more romantic themes.

There will be plenty of people who don’t agree that this is as good as the first one. There will be others who don’t believe that the sequel was necessary. I kind of see both of these points but I can’t agree with them. When a book is this lovely to read, I’m all for it. Sometimes, things should just be able to exist for the sake of existing.  Less is More  reminds me so much of the first book and I had such a great time reading it. If this is an indication of how good my 2023 books will be then this is going to be a great year. 

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How “Less Is Lost” Finds Its Footing

Pity the plight of the gay white man. Not as notorious as his heterosexual counterpart, more socially privileged than his queer peers, he has been drained of popular sympathy by virtue of his cultural success. Take the recent film “Fire Island,” Joel Kim Booster’s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice”: while the Bennet sisters are transformed into a gaggle of gay friends of color (mostly), the role of the villainous Mr. Wickham is given to Dex, a white seducer who deploys his Tom of Finland physique and sterling Instagram politics to prey upon his dazzled prospects. But a gay white guy as a marginalized hero, an underdog whose private tragedies we mourn? That’s a harder sell.

Or so Arthur Less, the protagonist of “ Less ,” Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 novel, is forced to conclude. Less, like Greer, is a middle-aged gay white novelist; his latest manuscript, “Swift,” is a sombre tale of—what else?—a middle-aged gay white man who wanders around San Francisco à la Leopold Bloom in Dublin, suffering various setbacks and contemplating his regrets. Less is shocked when his publisher rejects it outright. “It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that,” a lesbian friend explains. The book, as even Less comes to see, has been artistically petrified by his character’s self-pity, that “gorgon of Caucasian male ego.” It’s as good as dead.

Then Less has an idea. What if he rewrote his tragedy as a farce? Inspiration flows: “With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining.” Laughter suddenly replaces sighs and tears, and a holy fool steps in for a puffed-up hero.

Less’s strategy is also the strategy of “Less.” The novel maintains a delicious comic buoyancy as it follows the antics of its Buster Keatonish protagonist , buffeting him with one obstacle after another only to have him land, each time, on his feet. Dramatic irony usually casts readers as Cassandras: we watch with dread as unsuspecting characters meet with disaster. But what makes Less so endearing is his sincere ignorance of his good luck. Though Less himself is writing a “gay ‘Ulysses,’ ” the scope of his own journeys is more Homeric than Joycean; he leaves his home in San Francisco to travel to Mexico, then Italy, Germany, France, Morocco, India, and Japan, funding his exploits with teaching gigs, magazine assignments, and the like. The cause of all this wandering is Less’s desire to escape the impending wedding of his former lover Freddy Pelu, an English teacher some fifteen years his junior, whom Less, whether in the spirit of unpossessive generosity (as he wants to believe) or for fear of rejection (the truth), unwisely let get away. But Freddy is closer at hand than Less suspects: he’s the book’s affectionate, rueful narrator. How can he know what Less is doing, never mind thinking and feeling, from the other side of the world? He can’t, of course, and that imaginative leap is part of the book’s charm, the key to its romantic optimism. Telling Less’s story is Freddy’s way of keeping watch over him. You cheer for the couple’s reunion, though hapless Less proves such an enjoyable travelling companion that it’s bittersweet to bid him goodbye as he returns to California to find Freddy waiting for him with open arms.

Apparently, Greer felt the same way, because he has brought Less back, in “ Less Is Lost ” (Little, Brown), a sequel that picks up the plot nine months later. Freddy has moved into Less’s little house, called the Shack, and wants to get married. Less isn’t so sure. “This is the story of a crisis in our lives,” Freddy, enlisted again as the omniscient narrator, reports. Another one, so soon?

As the novel begins, it is Freddy who is far from home, on a sabbatical in Maine to study “narrative form.” On the verge of flying east to join him, Less learns that his first great love, the renowned poet Robert Brownburn, has died. The two men met on a San Francisco beach when Less was a svelte twenty-one and Robert was more than two decades older and married (to a woman—this was 1987). In fact, it is Robert’s ex-wife, Marian, who gives Less the bad news. And there’s more. The Shack belonged to Robert; when Robert left Less, after fifteen years together, he left him the house, too. Now Marian tells Less that he owes ten years of back rent. If he doesn’t come up with the money in a month, he and Freddy are out.

Less assures Freddy that he has a plan. He’s been asked to write a magazine profile of a best-selling science-fiction writer, H. H. H. Mandern, and is serving on the committee for a fancy literary prize, which entails some kind of honorarium. Also, a Louisiana-based drama troupe is offering Less an improbably fat sum to adapt one of his short stories for the stage and has invited him to tag along on its tour. Freddy manages to douse his skepticism in the name of love, but this reader had a harder time. San Francisco is among the most expensive rental markets in the country; the man needs a MacArthur grant, not a magazine assignment. In any case, the money is merely a pretext for Greer to send Less on another roving adventure, this one across the continental United States, beginning in Palm Springs, where he meets up with the gruff, shambolic Mandern—a George R. R. Martin type who enlists Less to chauffeur him and his pug across the Southwest in an old camper van—and ending in Delaware, Less’s home state. The novel advances by way of a series of road-trip encounters with characters who are mostly also “characters,” like Arathusa, who leads an off-the-grid Arizona commune and whose personal motto is “Know no no ,” and Miss Dorothy Howe-Gorbaty, the head of the theatre troupe, a steel magnolia with a penchant for dancing the Carolina shag. Less, who gets custody of the van, and the dog, after Mandern makes his exit, spends a great deal of time in R.V. parks—where he nervously tries to camouflage his sexuality by purchasing “a red bandanna, wraparound sunglasses, a HOOT ’N’ HOLLER T-shirt, flip-flops, a baseball cap, a cowboy hat, a bolo tie, and six miniature American flags”—and in beer bars, including one in Alabama where a patron surprises him by asking, “thoughtfully,” what it’s like to be gay. So much for disguises.

Homophobia isn’t a serious risk in the benign world of the “Less” books. The real threat comes in the form of the accusation—lobbed, inevitably, by a fellow middle-aged white gay male writer—that Less is a “bad gay,” too conciliatory to hetero sensibilities in his prose. The charge stings because Less fears that it may be true, and not just on the page. “When he moved to New York after college, in the eighties,” Freddy tells us, “Arthur Less certainly tried his hardest to be gay”:

He joined a gym that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a political party that turned out to believe a conspiracy theory about government health clinics. He joined a German-language society that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a book group that turned out to be only for a political party. He joined a role-playing game club that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a sex dungeon that turned out to be a government health clinic. It was all so confusing.

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This deadpan passage is typical of Greer’s best comic writing, with its exquisite attention to rhythm, repetition, and timing, the bright sentences tossed up like juggling balls to be caught in dazzling rotation.

Sexuality is one kind of performance. Nationality is another. Less’s countrymen often mistake him for a foreigner, a fair confusion when it comes to a member of that dreaded coastal caste, the publishing world, “which, like an orbiting space station, looks upon the rest of America without ever interacting with it.” To a globe-trotting “Minor American Novelist,” nowhere could be more exotic than America itself. Greer, a resident of San Francisco and Milan—the one in Italy, not to be confused with those in Georgia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, New Mexico, or New York—is gamely implicating himself. His acknowledgments include a note of thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation “for the grant that allowed for all the RV rentals.” He, too, has charted a course across the country’s great middle, and his findings, or Less’s, are often lovely. “You would think nothing would be as well oiled as the derricks pumping along the Mississippi River. And yet they squeak all night,” one perfect postcard of a paragraph reads.

Where Greer runs into trouble is in his attempt to use Less’s trip to gesture at the state of the Union writ large, an ambition that he signals early. At a gathering following Robert’s funeral, a smug Czech editor accuses Less of provincialism. Has he seen anything of his country beyond “New York, Boston, San Francisco?” And, speaking of his country, has he ever so much as wondered “if it’s wrong? The whole idea?” Less must admit that “the notion has never occurred to him.” Critiquing the American experiment has become something of a trope in the current political climate, but, though Greer’s novel is set in the approximate present, his America is a land curiously devoid of politics. Less manages to drive three thousand miles without coming across so much as a single MAGA hat; there seems to have been no major public-health crisis since AIDS .

“The American berserk,” as Philip Roth called the nation’s general resting state, has never been berserker. Other American satirists—Paul Beatty comes immediately to mind—have sparked to the country’s extremity. Greer, though, has a gentler sensibility. He wants to see the best in people, and that rare instinct puts him in a bind. How to confront the madness, let alone the viciousness, the violence, the cruelty, of the moment while maintaining the kind of comic equipoise that he prizes?

One answer is to spike the humor with harsher stuff. Freddy, so genially tolerant of his lover’s foibles in “Less,” takes on an edge in “Less Is Lost.” A self-described “pasticcio” of “Italian, Spanish, and Mexican heritages,” he is now dealt the thankless task of chiding Less for his white-male myopia. When Less is left stupefied after unknowingly sampling some hallucinogenic blueberries foisted on him by a trio of German tourists, Freddy reflects, “The world is so constructed that men like you will always end up safe. Almost always.” A few pages later, when Less finds himself riding a donkey down a ravine on Navajo land: “I hope Arthur Less realizes he knows nothing, nothing at all, about the people who once lived here, or those who live here now.” These appliqué indictments have the awkward feel of authorial preëmption; it’s as if Greer felt the need to make a show of taking his character to task for being categorically “problematic.” Perhaps to compensate, he saddles Less with emotional baggage (a dead mother, a long-absent father) that hints at painful depths without really creating them. These are “Swift”-ian touches, and they work no better in Greer’s novel than they evidently did in Less’s.

Freddy, though, isn’t just exasperated by Less. He’s jealous, too, of Less’s youthful love for Robert, and worries that he’ll never be able to take his predecessor’s place. That rawer, truer vein of feeling gives the novel back its heart. If “Less Is Lost” is, well, a lesser work than “Less,” there’s something sincerely winning in Greer’s undogmatic brand of small-c conservatism. Like Freddy, Greer is a believer: in love and, even more old-fashioned, in marriage. That ancient, flawed, astoundingly persistent institution gives Greer his strongest metaphor for the country’s predicament:

America, how’s your marriage? Your two-hundred-fifty-year-old promise to stay together in sickness and in health? First thirteen states, then more and more, until fifty of you had taken the vow. Like so many marriages, I know, it was not for love; I know it was for tax reasons, but soon you all found yourself financially entwined, with shared debts and land purchases and grandiose visions of the future, yet somehow, from the beginning, essentially at odds. Ancient grudges. That split you had—that still stings, doesn’t it? Who betrayed whom, in the end? I hear you tried getting sober. That didn’t last, did it?

What you’re hearing, mixed in with the humor, is melancholy. “If it can’t work for you, can it work for any of us?” Freddy asks. He’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Traditional comedy culminates in a wedding, traditional tragedy in death. We can’t presume to know how the American story, that insane and unprecedented jumble of genres, will end, but Less and Freddy’s story is another matter. No one’s private world is shielded from national storms, but often enough the sun does shine there. We need some novels to remind us of that, and this is one. ♦

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Book summary and reviews of Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

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Less Is Lost

Arthur Less Book #2

by Andrew Sean Greer

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Book summary.

In the follow-up to the "bedazzling, bewitching, and be-wonderful" ( New York Times ​) bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning Less: A Novel , the awkward and lovable Arthur Less returns in an unforgettable road trip across America.

"Go get lost somewhere, it always does you good." For Arthur Less, life is going surprisingly well: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freddy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis has Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him on a zigzagging adventure across the US. Less roves across the "Mild Mild West," through the South and to his mid-Atlantic birthplace, with an ever-changing posse of writerly characters and his trusty duo – a human-like black pug, Dolly, and a rusty camper van nicknamed Rosina. He grows a handlebar mustache, ditches his signature gray suit, and disguises himself in the bolero-and-cowboy-hat costume of a true "Unitedstatesian"... with varying levels of success, as he continues to be mistaken for either a Dutchman, the wrong writer, or, worst of all, a "bad gay." We cannot, however, escape ourselves—even across deserts, bayous, and coastlines. From his estranged father and strained relationship with Freddy, to the reckoning he experiences in confronting his privilege, Arthur Less must eventually face his personal demons. With all of the irrepressible wit and musicality that made Less a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning, must-read breakout book, Less Is Lost is a profound and joyous novel about the enigma of life in America, the riddle of love, and the stories we tell along the way.

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"Greer follows up his Pulitzer-winning Less with another delightful road story featuring middle-aged writer Arthur Less...Though a bit overboard at times, Greer packs in plenty of humor and some nicely poignant moments. Fans will eat this up." - Publishers Weekly "Greer does sometimes write beautifully about life and about fiction...If you loved the first one, you might love this, though it is a bit less fresh and a tad slow." - Kirkus Reviews "Andrew Sean Greer's new novel performs an astonishing magic trick: It makes you forget the state of the world—or, more specifically, America... Less Is Lost is a love story, but it's also about how we make art—which is to say, how we make meaning: of ourselves, each other, our lives. Greer pays attention. And if it's painful for him, as it is for Less, he also transmutes it into something that may survive the next 700 years: 'the restorative tonic of a funny tale.' In times like these, that feels like a gift." - Oprah Daily "The ending of Andrew Sean Greer's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Less , did not demand a sequel—it ended so perfectly—but lucky us, we're getting one anyway. Beloved Arthur Less, once again fleeing his problems, accepts invitations to a bunch of literary events and heads out on the road. This time, he's traveling throughout the United States. As he proved with Less , Greer excels at pinpointing the funniest parts of the writerly life, and we expect him to return to this winning comic realm." - BookPage "Technically accomplished, wildly entertaining...Like its predecessor, [ Less Is Lost ] is a feat of wit and brio, tougher than it looks...Greer's a master of the picaresque...Greer's wordplay is glorious." - Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Only Arthur Less could be both frustratingly stuck, yet on the move. Let loose, yet totally lost. Full of wit, but without a clue. And while he runs from himself, finds himself at the same time. Put all of that on a wild road trip through a wilder America, and you end up with something hilarious, affecting, and unforgettable." - Marlon James, winner of the 2015 Booker Prize "Excited to be reunited with our neurotic hero Arthur Less, I ripped through this sequel. It was a thrill to go on this odyssey with Less where even the most picayune comic encounters turn profound. Vulnerable and witty, Less Is Lost is a joy." - Cathy Park Hong, bestselling author of Minor Feelings

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Andrew Sean Greer Author Biography

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of five works of fiction, including The Confessions of Max Tivoli , which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O Henry Award for short fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco. He has traveled to all of the locations in his novel, Less , but he is only big in Italy.

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Lost And Found

Andrew Sean Greer continues his comic epic of gay love and commitment in ‘Less Is Lost’

Pulitzer-Prize winning Andrew Sean Greer has written an engrossing must-read sequel to his Pulitzer-Prize winning work ‘Less’. He calls it, appropriately, ‘Less is Lost.’   The story picks up several years after we left Arthur Less and his lover Freddy Pelu on the brink of reuniting after a tumultuous separation. Greer shows chutzpah in writing about a gay love affair as if it were meant to last forever. Despite societal gains, it’s still a relatively new thing .

‘Less’ told us about how Arthur Less, then in his mid-thirties, was still reeling from his first ex-lover’s exodus years ago.  Less had given the first 15 years of his young adult life to the famous imperial poet, Robert Brownburn, whom he had met accidentally on a San Francisco beach. He moved in with Brownburn shortly afterwards when his wife left.

Less had adored Brownburn, a very difficult man who expected Less to run their household smoothly so Brownburn could give his full attention to his writing.  Smitten, Less did as he was told, but not without resentment. When Brownburn eventually left a decade and a half later, after both of them had gotten sloppy, Less was convinced the possibility of having a long-term love relationship ever again had passed him by. He had his chance, and he had blown it.  But soon enough Less was in love again, almost by accident; this time with the much younger Freddy Pelu, whom he had been with now for nine years.  It had been a blissful time, until Freddy blindsided him with the news that he was leaving to marry another man.

Less, Sean Greer’s alter ego, felt he had to get out of town. He arranged a business trip related to his work as an author, so he would not have to be present when his lover Freddy married another man. The humiliation and public shame of it was unthinkable. Much of  Greer’s first book deals with the adventures of Arthur Less as he travels the world attending literary panels, and making speeches, while really thinking about what will happen to him now that Freddy has left him. He knows he is no spring chicken. But what he doesn’t know is that Freddy’s marriage lasted barely a day because he was still hopelessly in love with Arthur Less.

The book “Less” startled the literary world not only by winning the Pulitzer and selling more thann a million copies, but by taking us into the mindset of contemporary gay men and their feelings for one another now that the enticing but terrifying possibility of ‘forever’ exists for them.  Critics marveled at the way a certain joyousness sprinkled over it’s pages; muting the melancholy Andrew Sean Greer felt had been the mainstay of highbrow gay fiction. Greer wanted to believe there could be stories about gay men like himself who depression and loneliness didn’t completely engulf. ‘Less’ ends on a hopeful note; where the possibility of happiness between the two men remains resilient.

 Greer has one of his main characters, Freddy, narrate the story for us. He becomes Greer’s masterpiece. Freddy’s ability to beautifully express his undying love for Arthur Less, without fear of censure, coupled with his ability to see clearly his lovers foibles and missteps remain sandblasted in the reader’s imagination.

Andrew Greer had already started a sequel, but his first book’s extraordinary success must have intimidated him. He seems a lot like his alter-ego Arthur Less. He grew up in the suburbs of Washington D.C.,  both his parents worked as chemists, he started writing stories at 10, and became a creative writing major at Brown University, where he came out to his parents only to find out they already knew. His mother took it as the perfect time to announce she was a lesbian. Greer now lives with a romantic partner of many years.

Greer believes many gay men like himself have been able to find their own long-time loves that speaks to being happily ever after. He dwells inside a social circle where this had once been possible. He seems by nature upbeat and decided in a epiphany one morning that he would give his book a comic slant and his manuscript suddenly started to almost piece itself together.

In this charming and more penetrating sequel, ‘Less is Lost,’ Less and Freddy are still together, but unspoken cracks between them need mending. A crisis has emerged. Robert Brownburn, Less’s ex-lover, owns the house they’ve been living in. When Brownburn departed, he let Arthur remain there for free. But Brownburn has just died and his wife wants the house and rent for the years they have stayed there. Once again, Arthur hits the road to make enough money so they can remain where they are.

Arthur is no longer the bronzed young man he was when he lived there with Brownburn; middle-age has taken it’s toll on him.  He worries about his mortality, his reflection in the mirror, and whether Freddy still finds him attractive enough. But his literary career has skyrocketed and people in many places want him to come speak about his books. The trip, like the one he took years before, soon turns into a series of comic mishaps.

But beneath the hijincks that follow him wherever he goes, he feels a sadness about something going on between him and Freddy that is different from before. Greer is masterful at showing us how this sort of unknowing knowingness that something is amiss can sneak into a relationship and tear at it, perhaps even destroy it. We sense these men love one another.But Greer and Less seem to be wondering if that is enough.

Freddy’s narration is tender and heartbreaking at times.  Even though Freddy is home alone, Andrew Sean Greer grants him the power to see Less navigate a wider America that doesn’t always welcome him with open arms. Many sense Less is different, and ask him if he is from Scandinavia, but Less knows this is just their code for gay, and most of them find his otherness off-putting.  His father, who abandoned him as a child, is looking for him to tell him something important according ti Less’s sister, but she doesn’t know what he wants to tell her.

The road trip seems to enter into a manic phase where Less must succumb more gracefully to each day’s unexpected catastrophe. He tries to visit Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo’s homes in Mexico, but they aren’t situated where they are supposed to be. So much is out of place, it seems. Greer has found a masterful way to show us how we project our insecurities onto the world.  Less isn’t really concerned with each of the events he must attend; or even with all the things that keep going wrong.  He just wants to know why there is so much silence in his nightly calls with Freddy, and why sometimes Freddy doesn’t answer at all.

Readers don’t often give enough credit to finding the precise register in which to write, but Greer nails comedic pranks and silliness nestled amidst heartache with the aching precision of a surgeon. Greer’s rendering of Freddy is unforgettably moving. We get to hear Freddy recall his first days with Less. He recalls how he was only a kid at the time and Less came to one of his uncle’s beach parties. No one spoke to him because he was just a kid, but Less did, allowing Freddy to draw a portrait of him and taking the drawing  with an appreciative nod. It was a gesture Freddy would long remember.

Greer then allows Freddy to recount Less’s first gay sexual encounter. He tells us how afterwards Less began each day filled with “bouts of sobbing, sessions of terrible poetry writing, afternoons listening to Leonard Cohen, and private moments bringing Reilly’s light blue sweater to his face, trying to recapture some lost molecule, some leftover scent, which he himself, of course, had washed away.”  Other guys walked away from their first encounters feeling a sense of liberation.  Not Less. This initial wound stayed with him. Greer paints for us, in the intricate characterization of Freddy, a lover’s lover like no other.  We come to know him as someone who listens and cares intensely for Less. Someone willing to do anything for him.  Freddy didn’t only listen to what Less said; he listened carefully for things he had stopped saying.

Freddy knows he is more insecure than Less, but believes life without him would be unlivable.  He describes himself humbly as a “short and slight man approaching 40, the age at which the charming eccentricities of one’s twenties (sleeping in a silk bonnet to save my curls and wearing rabbit eared slippers ) becomes the zaniness of middle age.  My curls have patinaed like scallops on old silver; my red glasses magnify my myopia; I am winded after chasing the dog one time around the block.  But I am as yet unwrinkled: I am no Arthur Less.  Rather I am what I call an alloy (and my grandmother would call a pasticcio.)  Of Italian, Spanish, and Mexican heritage-mere nationalities, being themselves a mixture of Iberian, Indigenous, African, Arab, and Frankish migrations, breaking down further until we get to the elemental humans from whom we all descend.”

Freddy is trying  to keep optimistic, but as the weeks pass and Less isn’t with him, there are times he feels despair thinking “What other infidelities has Less hidden, forgotten, mislaid?  What future is there with such a man?”

Greer’s creation of both Less, who strikes us as a gay Everyman of today’s modern cosmopolitan world, and Freddy, who has the uncanny ability to see things Less can’t, work together to create for us a loving genuine relationship that is in the process of testing itself.  As readers, Greer has invested us in their future.  And we have come to believe in Freddy’s persistent gaze as a magical antidote to all that ails them. We believe Less will return to him. Greer’s second act is worthy of the first; he has done it again.

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Elaine Margolin

Elaine is a book critic for The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Times Literary Supplement, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jerusalem Post, Denver Post, and several literary journals. She has been reviewing books for over 20 years with a sense of continual wonder and joy. She tends to focus on non-fiction and biographies.

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Awards & Accolades

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Pulitzer Prize Winner

by Andrew Sean Greer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 18, 2017

Seasoned novelist Greer (The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells, 2013, etc.) clearly knows whereof he speaks and has lived to...

Facing his erstwhile boyfriend’s wedding to another man, his 50th birthday, and his publisher’s rejection of his latest manuscript, a miserable midlist novelist heads for the airport.

When it comes to the literary canon, Arthur Less knows he is “as superfluous as the extra a in quaalude,” but he does get the odd invitation—to interview a more successful author, to receive an obscure prize, to tour French provincial libraries, that sort of thing. So rather than stay in San Francisco and be humiliated when his younger man of nine years' standing marries someone else (he can’t bear to attend, nor can he bear to stay home), he puts together a patchwork busman’s holiday that will take him to Paris, Morocco, Berlin, Southern India, and Japan. Of course, anything that can go wrong does—from falling out a window to having his favorite suit eaten by a stray dog, and as far as Less runs, he will not escape the fact that he really did lose the love of his life. Meanwhile, there’s no way to stop that dreaded birthday, which he sees as the definitive end of a rather extended youth: “It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.” Yet even this conversation occurs in the midst of a make-out session with a handsome Spanish stranger on a balcony at a party in Paris…hinting that there may be steaks and coffee on the other side. Upping the tension of this literary picaresque is the fact that the story is told by a mysterious narrator whose identity and role in Less’ future is not revealed until the final pages.

Pub Date: July 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-316-31612-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Lee Boudreaux/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

LITERARY FICTION

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SEEN & HEARD

THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger .

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

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by Chinua Achebe

THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

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by Donna Tartt

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Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

• Publication Date: June 27, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Humor
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• ISBN-10: 0316498912
• ISBN-13: 9780316498913
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The Lost Story: A Novel Hardcover – July 16, 2024

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Ballantine Books
• Publication date July 16, 2024
• Dimensions 6.35 x 1.16 x 9.51 inches
• ISBN-10 0593598873
• ISBN-13 978-0593598870
• See all details

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About the author, excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved., product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books (July 16, 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593598873
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593598870
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.31 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.35 x 1.16 x 9.51 inches
• #365 in Fantasy Action & Adventure
• #438 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
• #762 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Meg shaffer.

Meg Shaffer is a part-time creative writing instructor and a full-time MFA candidate in TV and Screenwriting at Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri. When not watching Hitchcock films, she's reading Star Trek novels. When she's not reading Star Trek novels, she's napping. Her debut novel "The Wishing Game" is available now from Ballantine.

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Customers say

Customers find the story vivid, imaginative, and escapist. They describe the reading experience as exciting, magical, and sweet. Readers also appreciate the descriptive writing style.

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Customers find the story vivid, exciting, and magical. They also appreciate the good premise but weak execution.

"...There are a few secrets. A world of danger. Imaginative. Adventure . Great read for those who like fairy tales...." Read more

"...Her descriptions are so vivid and the story really came alive within my head ...." Read more

"...Quite the adventure. Good, clean, fun story ." Read more

"A beautiful story of finding . I cannot wait to find out what happens next. Books really are the best magic." Read more

Customers find the book imaginative, exciting, and magical. They also say it's a great read for those who like fairy tales.

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"...Quite the adventure. Good , clean, fun story." Read more

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"...Her descriptions are so vivid and the story really came alive within my head...." Read more

"...I loved every bit of it, even the wicked Ghost Town, because it's written so vividly . Meg Shaffer truly has a gift for world-building...." Read more

"...Right away I remember this authors descriptive writing . Slow beginning; at 40% took quite a while to get to the “meat” of the tale...." Read more

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Jobs report revision: US added 818,000 fewer jobs than believed

The labor market last year seemed to shrug off historically high interest rates and inflation , gaining well over 200,000 jobs a month.

Turns out the nation’s jobs engine wasn’t quite as invincible as it appeared.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday revised down its estimate of total employment in March 2024 by 818,000, the largest such downgrade in 15 years. That effectively means there were 818,000 fewer job gains than first believed from April 2023 through March 2024.

So, instead of adding a robust average of 242,000 jobs a month during that 12-month period, the nation gained a still solid 174,000 jobs a month, according to the latest estimate.

The revision is based on the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which draws from state unemployment insurance records that reflect actual payrolls, while the prior estimates come from monthly surveys. The estimate is preliminary, however, and a final figure will be released early next year.

The largest downward revision was in professional and business services, with estimated payrolls lowered by 358,000, followed by a 150,000 downgrade in leisure and hospitality and 115,000 in manufacturing.

Is the Fed expected to lower interest rates?

The significantly cooler labor market depicted by the revisions could affect the thinking of Federal Reserve officials as they weigh when – and by how much – to lower interest rates now that inflation is easing. Many economists expect the Fed to reduce rates by a quarter percentage point next month, though some anticipated a half-point cut after a report early this month that showed just 114,000 job gains in July.

Wednesday’s revisions underscore that the labor market could have been softening for much longer than previously thought.

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Is the US in recession right now?

Although the new estimates don't mean the nation is in a recession, “it does signal we should expect monthly job growth to be more muted and put extra pressure on the Fed to cut rates,” economist Robert Frick of Navy Federal Credit Union wrote in a note to clients.

Some economists, however, are questioning the fresh figures. Goldman Sachs said the revision was likely overstated by as much as 400,000 to 600,000 because unemployment insurance records don’t include immigrants lacking permanent legal status who have contributed dramatically to job growth the past couple of years.

Based on estimates before Wednesday's revisions, about 1 million jobs, or a third of those added last year, likely went to newly arrived immigrants, including many who entered the country illegally, RBC Capital Markets estimates.

Also, the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages itself has been revised up every quarter since 2019 by an average of 100,000, Goldman says. In other words, Wednesday's downward revision could turn out to be notably smaller when the final figures are published early next year.

Advertisement

Oprah Winfrey, in a Convention Debut, Calls Harris ‘the Best of America’

The surprise appearance by the television legend was closely held by Democratic organizers. Ms. Winfrey even rehearsed her speech wearing sunglasses and a face mask.

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Oprah Celebrates Kamala as a Child of Immigrants

Oprah winfrey spoke on the third night of the democratic convention. she gave kamala harris a full-throated endorsement, saying that voting for her is “common sense.”.

I’ve lived in Mississippi, in Tennessee, in Wisconsin, Maryland, Indiana, Florida, Hawaii, Colorado, California and sweet home, Chicago, Ill. I’ve seen racism and sexism and income inequality and division. I’ve not only seen it at times, I’ve been on the receiving end of it. We are not so different from our neighbors. When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion. We don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted — no. We just try to do the best we can to save them. We’re going to be teaching our daughters and sons about how this child of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, two idealistic, energetic immigrants. Immigrants — how this child grew up to become the 47th president of the United States. That is the best of America.

By Michael M. Grynbaum

Reporting from Chicago

• Aug. 21, 2024

The television legend Oprah Winfrey returned to prime time on Wednesday in a surprise appearance at the Democratic National Convention, calling on Americans to choose “optimism over cynicism” and “inclusion over retribution” as she endorsed the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, whose life story Ms. Winfrey deemed “the best of America.”

Ms. Winfrey, a billionaire media mogul who built her career in Chicago, had never before spoken at a national convention. Her speech was carefully kept under wraps by Democratic organizers, including a cloak-and-dagger act during rehearsals in which one of the most famous women in America crept into the United Center wearing a hat, sunglasses and a face mask.

When Ms. Winfrey said hello to Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, Ms. Pelosi had no idea who she was at first, according to Ms. Winfrey’s friend Gayle King, the CBS anchor.

The obvious excitement in the crowd when Ms. Winfrey emerged on Wednesday evening was a reminder of her power as a public speaker and a widely recognized icon of optimism, particularly among the female and Black voters that Ms. Harris is hoping to turn out in big numbers on Election Day.

Ms. Winfrey’s speech touched on school integration, the preservation of democracy, and civil rights icons like John Lewis. Dressed in a purple outfit, she appeared to direct her remarks toward the country’s political independents, a cohort to which she said she belonged.

“Decency and respect are on the ballot in 2024, and just plain common sense,” Ms. Winfrey said, before building to a climactic passage that evoked the energy of her daytime talk show, which ended in 2011.

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