But wait - the crowning humiliation of “our gay Job” is that his boyfriend, having dumped him, is now getting married.Īs Hunter S. How many other writers of his acquaintance said ‘no chance’? How far down the list did they go before someone said: ‘What about Arthur Less?’” Mandern, who has made zillions writing “space operettas” of “tin-ear language and laughable stock characters.” Arthur knows that the event sponsor has made the calculation: “What literary writer would agree to prepare for an interview and yet not be paid? It had to be someone terribly desperate.

Now, on the cusp of the dreaded 50th birthday, Arthur finds himself in a sort of authorial Sargasso Sea, “too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books,” reduced to accepting gigs like interviewing a mega-best-selling author named H.H.H.

“But every author can taste the poison another has slipped into the punch,” and the critic ended by calling Arthur “a magniloquent spoony.” Staring at this odd phrase, Arthur asked his lover at the time, a distinguished older poet, “What the hell was a spoony?” “‘Arthur,’ Robert said, holding his hand, ‘he’s just calling you a faggot.’” His first book, now distant in the rearview mirror, was a “moderate success.” A big-name critic reviewed it in these very pages. That is, at least, how he feels at times like these.” Arthur is a novelist, and that’s not going well, either. The mysterious narrator tells us that Arthur is “the first homosexual ever to grow old. The setup: Nothing is going well for Arthur Less.

“Less” is the funniest, smartest and most humane novel I’ve read since Tom Rachman’s 2010 debut, “The Imperfectionists.” His admirers have included John Updike, Michael Chabon, Dave Eggers and John Irving. $26.Ĭonvulsed in laughter a few pages into Andrew Sean Greer’s fifth novel, “Less,” I wondered with regret why I wasn’t familiar with this author.

A Lee Boudreaux Book/Little, Brown & Company.

The imperfectionists novel