Arthur Less is about to turn fifty, his career is politely stalling, and the younger man he loved for nine years is marrying someone else. Rather than attend the wedding, he says yes to a ramshackle itinerary of minor literary gigs, a half-serious interview in New York, a teaching stint in Berlin, a prize ceremony in Italy, a writers' retreat in the desert, and sets off around the world mostly to be anywhere but home. The comedy comes from watching a man flee his feelings across multiple time zones while those feelings cheerfully keep pace with him.
Greer's great trick is tone. The book is genuinely funny, full of small humiliations and absurd misadventures, Less in an ill-advised costume, Less mangling his self-taught German, Less convinced of his own irrelevance, and the prose is light, ironic, and quietly dazzling. But the satire is affectionate rather than cruel. Greer clearly loves his hapless hero, and the humor keeps turning, almost without warning, into real tenderness. It's a comic novel that earns sudden moments of ache about aging, lost time, and the fear of having peaked.
There's also a sly structural surprise that I won't spoil, involving who is telling this story and why, which recasts the whole book as something more romantic than it first appears. By the end, the globe-trotting farce reveals itself as a meditation on whether a life that feels like a series of near-misses might actually have been a success all along. It's the rare literary comedy that is both very smart about its own form and genuinely moving.
The honest caveat: this is a quiet, interior book that lives in wordplay, irony, and the texture of Less's anxieties more than in plot. Readers who want strong forward momentum or higher stakes may find it slight, and the humor is gentle and bittersweet rather than laugh-out-loud broad. Its pleasures are those of voice and observation, savored slowly.
Why you should read
- Great if you love witty, bittersweet literary comedy
- Great if you enjoy gorgeous, ironic prose
- Great if a tender satire of midlife appeals
- Great if you like a quiet love story told sideways
What to expect
- Affectionate satire rather than broad farce
- A quiet, interior, wordplay-driven novel
- A globe-trotting structure with a late surprise
- Comedy that keeps turning into real feeling
Part of the fun is how neatly Greer skewers the literary world itself. The conferences, the prizes, the panel questions, the ego of writers and the indifference of audiences all get a gentle, knowing roasting, and Less's own minor reputation, never famous, never quite forgotten, is the perfect vantage from which to send up the whole circus. It's satire that comes from the inside, written by someone who clearly knows these rooms and loves them anyway. The travel is vividly drawn, too, each city sketched in a few precise, atmospheric strokes, so the book doubles as a wry grand tour even as its real journey is happening inside its hero. Given that, it's close to perfect at what it sets out to do. Greer writes sentence by sentence with real delight, and the book leaves you unexpectedly hopeful about the comedy and dignity of getting older. Come for the around-the-world misadventures; stay for the surprisingly big heart hiding inside the satire.
