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Ironic Third Person Present
Mar. 9th, 2020 09:26 pmJul 2019
Less - Andrew Sean Greer – Abacus, 2017 (Kindle edition)
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So apparently this won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018. I have no idea why. It has some nice turns of phrase, but very little else to recommend it.
The basic premise is entertaining enough - an accident-prone writer about to turn fifty goes on a world tour to avoid attending the marriage of an ex-boyfriend for whom he still has feelings - but there isn't a lot more to it than that. You can get a feel for the situations he finds himself in from the first chapter, which is set at an SF convention in New York, where Less is waiting to meet a publicist who will escort him to a panel with a famous swords and sorcery writer in front of an audience of fans. However the clock he is looking at has stopped (a fact which, implausibly, he does not recognise for over fifteen minutes), and the publicist thinks that she is meeting a woman, for the (somewhat racist) reason that she is Japanese. Mild social embarrassment results, which is increased when it turns out that the famous writer a) has food poisoning, b) is not into cosplay as Less had been led to believe.
And so it continues, with Less moving to a new country with each chapter and becoming embroiled in similar incidents. He also has a number of affairs with men who are considerably younger than he is, which struck me as more likely to be authorial wish-fulfillment than a realistic depiction of gay relationships. The authorial voice, which I can only describe as ironic third person present, is typical of modern literary novels, though there is a sort of explanation for it at the end.
To be fair, there are probably some disappointed expectations here, though the lazy trope of the author protagonist should have been a warning sign. I got it because of a recommendation that it was "hilarious", which for me it most certainly was not. This is a relatively short book, but 250 pages of a basically comfortably-off writer feeling sorry for himself, getting into scrapes and having lots of sex was more than enough.
