San Francisco writer Andrew Sean Greer chats about “Less,” his first comic novel.
Throughout his career, Andrew Sean Greer has written serious novels. “The Confessions of Max Tivoli,” his 2004 breakthrough, imagined a man, born old, who ages backward. In 2013’s “The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells,” his title character lives three versions of her life.
Now Greer has done something completely unexpected: He’s written a comic novel.
“Less” (Little Brown, $26, 272 pages) is so funny, it’s hard to believe it started as a drama — “a sort of poignant, wistful novel,” the author said, “about a middle-aged man who walks across San Francisco, reflecting on his life and loves.”
Today, Greer admits it didn’t work. “I just couldn’t feel sorry for him,” he said. “It wasn’t tragic.”
Rather than abandon the book, Greer flipped it, making his protagonist a Job-like character for whom, if anything can go wrong, it probably will. The result is a witty, brilliant tour de force — Greer’s finest work to date.
Talking about “Less” recently over iced tea, Greer, 46, said the story took its own path. “The hardest part for me is finding a way into the novel,” he said. “It can take a year. Once I find it, it feels inevitable. With this one, it took a while — then it was the only way to write it.”
“Less” is the story of Arthur Less, a gay San Francisco novelist who is experiencing a mid-life crisis. His 50th birthday is fast approaching. His literary reputation is fading. Worst of all, his younger boyfriend has decided to marry someone else — and Arthur is invited to the wedding.
Rather than endure the humiliation, Arthur accepts a stack of invitations to author events around the world. As he travels to readings, festivals and awards ceremonies in New York, Mexico, Paris, Berlin, Morocco, India and Japan, the mishaps pile up like literary rejects in a second-hand bookstore.
Surprisingly, Greer said that travel wasn’t part of the original story. “But I was traveling, and I was alone, so I just took notes,” he said. “When I’d come back, I’d tell my friends, and it was funny. It was so much fun, I got rid of the main story and invented a new plot.”
It’s not that Greer didn’t feel sympathy for Less. “Every writer is an outsider,” said the author, who lives in San Francisco’s Lower Haight with his husband, a change management consultant in the tech industry. “But being mid-list and mid-life is hard. No one can celebrate you for being a debut writer or as a comeback — a rediscovered elderly writer.”
Writing a comedy offered an irresistible opportunity to skewer some of the absurd extremes of contemporary literature — as in Less’s humiliating appearance on a Mexican panel devoted to his former lover, poet Robert Brownburn of the celebrated Russian River school; or his encounter with fantasy writer H.H.H. Mandern, the tin-eared, immensely popular author of “space operettas.” There’s a sandstorm in Morocco, a wardrobe malfunction in India and an awards ceremony in Italy where the jury is made up of 12 high school students.
Like Less, Greer has traveled widely — which gave him plenty of background for “Less.”
“I had two rules,” he said. “I could not put in any details that I did not see myself and write in my notebook. I didn’t want to write a fantasy of a foreign country; India isn’t all elephants and saffron robes and Berlin isn’t lederhosen and polkas. The second rule was that the joke was on Arthur. He’s the one who’s always out of place.”
Greer’s sense of humor is apparent on every page, but “Less” has an emotional depth absent in many comic novels; in the end, the novel is a sublime meditation on second chances. He cites influences such as Nabokov’s “Pnin,” Updike’s “Bech” books and Roth’s Zuckerman novels. “Less” is dedicated to Daniel Handler, another San Francisco writer of rare comic gifts. The two men have been friends for years and Greer said that Handler read multiple drafts of “Less.” “His best advice was in the last chapter,” Greer said. “He said ‘shorten it.’” Greer did.
Greer still seems a little surprised that “Less” is a hit, but he’s glad he decided to go with his impulse to turn a serious novel into comic one. I ask if he plans to return to Arthur in a future book. “I don’t think I’m finished with him,” he said. “This is my favorite book that I’ve written. He was so much fun to write.”
Contact Georgia Rowe at growe@ pacbell.net.