Awkwardness makes novel charming
Heat we expected, but who knew that summer would yield such a refreshing rain of comic novels?
Tom Perrotta’s “Mrs. Fletcher” is just around the corner, and this month we have already been treated to Joshua Cohen’s “Moving Kings,” Matthew Klam’s “Who Is Rich?” and Andrew Sean Greer’s “Less.”
Greer is a lovely writer capable of mingling humor with sharp poignancy. His books frequently feature a clever conceit, such as his breakout best-seller, “The Confessions of Max Tivoli” (2004), about a man who ages backward.
His new novel doesn’t share that fantastical element, but it is just as preoccupied with aging.
At the start, midlist novelist Arthur Less ■ clings to 49 as if it were the lip of a volcano. He has waited with muted expectation through “his exclusion from any list of best writers under thirty, under forty, under fifty — they make no lists above that.” Now, he’s sure that he’s “the first homosexual ever to grow old.”
The gently mocking tone reflects Less’ attitude about his many foibles, and his anxiety has been exacerbated by his split with his boyfriend, who is about to marry a younger man.
Instead of sitting through the wedding faking a grin, Less decides to send his regrets and flee. He paws through old mail and blindly accepts the invitations he has received from around the world: a hodgepodge of teaching assignments, retreats and readings.
Those gigs provide the novel’s structure — a different country for each chapter — which is a challenge for Less but a boon for his creator. Greer is brilliantly funny about the awkwardness that awaits.
At a science-fiction convention, Less is mistaken for a woman. In Mexico, he finds himself on a panel being asked, “What is it like to go on, knowing you are not a genius, knowing you are a mediocrity?”
While Less rides a camel in Morocco and gets trapped in a Christian retreat in India, we learn about this tenderhearted man who hasn’t developed the leathery hide of adulthood.
Greer writes, “All he has managed to grow is a gentle sense of himself, akin to the transparent carapace of a soft-shelled crab.”
Unfailingly polite, hypersensitive to the risk of boring anyone, Less remains congenial, but “the tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.”
The most hilarious chapter plays out in Germany, where Less operates under the misimpression that he is a professor and speaks fluent German. On the first day, Less announces to his startled students, “I am sorry, I must kill most of you.”
No matter. They adore him. As will you.