Greer breaking rules of literary world again
Author writes sequel to Pulitzer-winning comedy and expects some raised eyebrows
In spring 2018, novelist Andrew Sean Greer was working as the director of a writers residency in Tuscany, where his unofficial duties included cleaning up after an incontinent pug. The pug belonged to his boss, and Greer felt the frequent messes had gotten out of hand.
“I decided we can’t have this happening at the dinner table,” Greer said recently. “Margaret Atwood is coming, and I was like, we can’t.”
Greer began dressing the dog in diapers, held in place with snazzy rainbow and rhinestone suspenders. One evening, after he had finished swaddling the pug, he got a barrage of congratulatory text messages, with emojis of fireworks and dancing ladies. Puzzled, Greer called a friend, novelist Michael Chabon, who confirmed the news: Greer’s novel “Less” had won the Pulitzer Prize. “He was like, am I the person who’s telling you?” Greer recalled. (He was.)
The fact that Greer had just wrangled a pug into diapers made the life-altering news seem all the more surreal.
“Less” — a rollicking romantic comedy about a heartbroken novelist who goes on a journey around the world to avoid his ex-boyfriend’s wedding — was not a typical choice for the prize committee, which tends to favor dense novels with lofty themes. It’s a gay love story with a happy ending. It’s a book about a writer who struggles with his craft. It satirizes the literary world’s obsession with status and even pokes fun at the sanctimony surrounding the Pulitzer.
Greer was, naturally, elated by the news but also confounded: He never expected “Less” to reach a wide audience, because his previous five books hadn’t.
“I thought no one was going to read it, which was very liberating,” Greer said. “I put things in I thought no one would ever read, and it’s a little shocking now.”
Greer’s decades of relative obscurity are over. “Less” went on to sell more than 1 million copies, and Greer, 51, has written a hotly anticipated sequel, titled “Less is Lost,” which Little, Brown and Company recently released. The sequel follows his hapless hero and alter-ego, struggling novelist Arthur Less, as he takes a cross-country tour of the American South in a camper van with a pug named Dolly.
Readers who longed for more of Less will likely be satisfied by “Less is Lost.” The novel has been praised by writers including Marlon James, Katie Kitamura and David Sedaris, who called it “wildly, painfully funny.” Publishers Weekly predicted that “fans will eat this up.”
Still, Greer is aware that some in the literary world might view his decision to write a sequel as uninspired — or worse, a crass money grab.
“My agent was like, ‘You can’t write a sequel to a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel; that’s just not seemly,’ ” he said.
“Well, it isn’t!” Greer continued. “It’s weird. It was a one-off. It ends. I certainly didn’t think there was more to do. But I really wanted to write about America, and it was a really good way to do it.”
Greer’s literary success arrived suddenly but hardly overnight. After years of rejections, he finally sold a story collection, then in 2001 published his debut
novel, “The Path of Minor Planets,” which centers on a group of astronomers who meet every six years to observe a comet. When he released his second novel, “The Confessions of Max Tivoli,” a fantasy about a man who is born old and
ages backward, in 2004, Greer seemed to be on the cusp of literary stardom. John Updike compared the book to Marcel Proust and Vladimir Nabokov; the Today Show picked it for its book club. But the spotlight was fleeting, and his next two novels sold modestly. He failed to earn advances back; foreign publishers dropped him.
Greer tried to reinvent himself with each book, experimenting with magical realism and fantasy. It was creatively fulfilling, he said, but perhaps not great for his brand.
When Greer started writing “Less” in 2014, it began as a somber literary novel about a gay writer on the cusp of 50, walking aimlessly around San Francisco and reflecting on aging, mortality and his fear of irrelevance. But even Greer could scarcely bring himself to care about Less. “We were already in a
phase where a middle-aged white gay man was clearly a person of privilege,” he said, “and he owns property in San Francisco.”
One morning, he was swimming in the bay with his friend Daniel Handler, author of the Lemony Snicket books, when he hit on the solution: “I thought, what if I make fun of him instead?”
He reworked the novel into a comedy, piling major and minor indignities onto Less. Many of those moments were drawn loosely from Greer’s life, including the time a fellow writer accused him of being “a bad gay” because his novels were insufficiently gay.
In transforming the plot from a minor tragedy into a comedy, Greer found himself writing a joyful, exuberant story — a tone he’d never tried before and one that’s rare in literary fiction, particularly in stories about gay people, he said.
“There’s a lot of sad books about being queer,” he said. “I thought I would really like one on my shelf that has some sense of joy in it.”
Success hasn’t made writing any easier. Greer is uncomfortably aware that a lot of people will likely read his new novel and that many will compare it to its prize-winning predecessor. “It’s harder to follow that instinct of, ‘Who cares; no one will look at this; I can put in something dirty or a secret,’ ” he said.
Greer harbored his own doubts about the sequel, which is a standard stage of his painful, messy creative process. When asked how he overcame those hurdles, he resorted again to selfeffacement.
“The usual way,” he said cheerfully. “Nervous breakdowns and moments of grandiosity, alternating.”