Ms. Hen reviews Less

Less

Andrew Sean Greer

Little, Brown Company

2017

Ms. Hen read this because she happened to find it at a Little Free Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was planning on going to Cambridge, so she looked online to see if there are any Little Free Libraries there, and of course, there are. She picked this book because she had heard that it won the Pulitzer Prize this year. She didn’t realize that she had read another book by this author, THE IMPOSSIBLE LIVES OF GRETA WELLS, which she adored.

At first, it was hard for Ms. Hen to get into this novel. She didn’t know what to think of it. She had just finished reading THE HELP, which was long and serious, and not funny at all, so she was not prepared for how to read LESS. This novel is funny in the way that it looks at people and analyzes them and picks them apart. This novel is charming and unique.

Less is about a moderately successful gay writer, Arthur Less, who is about to turn fifty, and decides to turn down a wedding invitation from his ex-lover, Freddy, because he believes it would be traumatic and embarrassing. Instead, he accepts invites from all around the world to literary related events. He travels to Mexico, Italy, Germany, France, Morocco, India, and Japan, all while thinking of Freddy and his new husband.

LESS is a self-deprecating look at a man who thinks he is a loser, but is not. Arthur Less is a writer who has loved and been loved, published a few books, and some people admire them, and some people do not. The novel that Arthur Less writes that gets rejected by his published is about a gay man walking around San Francisco thinking about his life, and Less calls it a gay ULYSSES. He changes the novel to make it more of a humorous journey, which is similar to LESS.

When Ms. Hen read this, she couldn’t help thinking of the essay writer, David Sedaris, who writes with a similar style and subject matter. Ms. Hen read ME TALK PRETTY ONE DAY while she was in France. Ms. Hen also thinks LESS has echoes of MOBY DICK, in the way that Arthur Less keeps chasing his great white whale, which Ms. Hen decided is his career, and also love.

There is one mention of chickens, when Less is in India driving down the road, looking at things, “the endless series of shops, as if made from one continuous concrete barrier, painted at intervals with different signs advertising chickens and medicine…” Ms. Hen likes to find the chickens when she is reading; it’s like a game for her. Some books have myriads of chickens, and some have none.

Ms. Hen thinks that this is one of the most original novels she has read. She has not read anything quite like it before. LESS is funny and bittersweet and adventurous and romantic. She believes that more humor should exist in the world, because if we can laugh, especially at ourselves, it makes life a lot more bearable.