First comedy no small feat
Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer tells Ethan Sills about discovering that Less means more
You would think that if you were about to win one of the most coveted awards in your profession, you might be given some warning that your life could be about to change exponentially. That’s true of most literary awards; prizes like the Booker go through lengthy and public processes made up of lists long and short as they try to determine a winner.
Yet, if you’re in the running for a Pulitzer Prize — perhaps the United States’ most esteemed prize for all manner of writers — it turns out you find out that you were on the shortlist only after you’ve won or lost.
Andrew Sean Greer learned that the hard way. He was running a writers’ retreat in Italy when it was announced his novel Less had won the 2018 Prize for Fiction, meaning it took hours for him to learn he had been elevated on to the same pedestal as Harper Lee and Cormac McCarthy.
“I found out after everyone else in my life knew, which made it even more of a shock,” he recalls.
“I had no cellphone reception, I had an Italian sim. I was actually cooking my dinner when everyone was calling everyone — I was otherwise detained.”
It’s a quaint predicament, one that readers of
Less may imagine befalling the hero of that award-winning work. The novel — part comedy, part travelogue, entirely endearing — chronicles the many and varied misadventures of struggling author Arthur Less. He’s described as “all comedy” and “without skin”, someone fighting for credibility and against middle age while stumbling from one adventure to the next.
They aren’t the most flattering characteristics but Greer says they are the main reasons Arthur struck a chord with fans around the world: “I kept reminding myself of his innocence, which is the source of his troubles but also the source of our affection for him. That’s the comic role, the innocent wandering into everything and everything becoming chaotic, yet somehow surviving all of it.”
In Less, that chaos comes as Arthur embarks on a global voyage that is really an elaborate excuse not to attend the wedding of his exboyfriend. We follow his mishaps as he attends awards ceremonies, birthday parties and festivals all while inadvertently letting his middle-class idiosyncrasies get in the way.
The success of Less has seen Greer invited to literary festivals around the world. His visit to Auckland for this month’s Auckland Writers Festival is the latest stop on an itinerary that has already included much of the United States, India and Australia.
Having published five other books, he expected Less would receive the same politely quiet reception they did; winning a Pulitzer was never part of the equation.
“When a book is first in your head, you think it’s going to be about everything, it’s going to be the greatest thing ever written and then, as you go on, that falls apart and you manage to salvage it,” he says. “I only knew near the end that I had got the closest to making the thing
I had in my head with a book than I had ever done, and I was immensely pleased with it.”
His mantra for each chapter was to write it as if recounting the story to friends over a drink at the end of the day. Greer had to rely on his instincts for Less more than his other novels but he had a simple goal in mind to create a portrait of a character, balancing poignancy and comedy without skirting on the sophistication of the text.
He wanted readers to feel they’d met a person but it took a while to find the right path to send Arthur down — largely as, after writing five quite serious tales, Greer “couldn’t bear” to write another one.
“It took me a year and a half to realise that the only way to tell this story was to ridicule, that was the only loving way I could tell the story of a rather privileged person and his personal difficulties.”
Finding that was a relief, Greer says — “I enjoyed it so much I hope I never have to write a serious book again” — and he’s sticking to that for now, hard at work on his next novel — another comedy.
He says he used to feel a “real pressure” to make something great when writing to justify his career. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t have that same burden but success means his time is not as free as it once was as travelling and doing interviews — lovely as it is — eats away at the writing.
And even with new work under way, it will be a long time before Greer escapes from Less.
He has signed a deal for the film and television rights, and remains open to the idea of a sequel someway down the track. (“Lesser? Even Less? Less is Less? It sounds fun just to plan it.”)
But Arthur, for all his faults and foibles, has given his creator a life-changing year. So it’s perhaps fitting that Greer has one “Lessian” piece of advice for his fellow writers: commit to your weaknesses.
“That’s where the good stuff is and that’s what’s hard to get to and that’s what no one can train you to. Go for the part of you that everyone tries to cut out of your book or people are always trying to fix in you. That would be where the art is.”