What Book to Read?

Published in 2017, this book deservedly won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.  Quite randomly, a character in the book wins a Pulitzer Prize. ‘It’s not Pew-lit-sir’, he says. ‘It’s Pull-it-sir’. That’s an in joke. Perhaps if you want to be deeply moved or challenged it’s not the book for you. But if you want to forget for a while the awfulness of things, you’ll love it.

Arthur Less is a middle aged, middle brow writer. He lived for a number of years with Robert Brownburn, doyen of the Russian River School of writers in California; he’s the one that wins a Pulitzer. (The Russian River Writers Guild is real; Robert sounds a bit like the ‘beat’ writer Alan Ginsberg.)  Arthur has more recently been living with Freddy, but they have split up, and Freddy is about marry someone else. Though he is of course invited, Arthur cannot bear the thought of being anywhere near the wedding, so he accepts a swag of invitations that will take him overseas – to a teaching post, a conference, a travel article, anything … He plans to spend time in Mexico, Italy, Germany, France, Morocco, India and Japan. What could possibly go wrong? The book is the story of his travels, with flashbacks to earlier events; it is also an exploration of getting older, and what it means to love.

Arthur’s surname, Less, is an aptronym, a personal name aptly or peculiarly suited to its owner; think of Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind. Less is – or at least he feels he is – less of a writer, less of a person, less loveable than other people. He is, he says, ‘Nobody’.  When his most recently published book is praised in Italy – having been largely ignored in the United States – he thinks it must be because the translator ‘worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian’. Believing he must have been mistaken for someone else and is in the wrong car, he ‘readies himself for full mortification’. Asked to read from the book in Germany, he thinks he is being set up for a ‘writerly humiliation planned by the universe to suck at the bones of minor artists like him.’ In France, criticism from another writer leads him to think not just that he is ‘a bad writer … a bad lover, a bad friend, a bad son. Apparently the condition is worse. He is bad at being himself’. In India, he thinks ‘What an ass he is, everywhere he goes.’

The book is suffused with a gentle, wry humour. Often this arises when things go wrong. He’s (naturally) lost his luggage; ‘he is well acquainted with humility. It is one piece of luggage he has not lost’. What he has lost ‘will circle the globe to no purpose, like so many travellers.’ Sometimes it is because of the disjunction between Less’s catastrophizing and what actually happens; when, for example ‘life has pardoned him at the scaffold steps’.  And sometimes it’s just in the writer’s understated observations, as in ‘the restaurant … is very old and water stained in ways that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor’.

Less’s most recent manuscript has been rejected by his publisher, and one of his hopes for the journey is that he can somehow fix it up at a writers’ retreat in India. This doesn’t happen quite as he hoped, but he does get to revise it. His agent says it is ‘Too wistful. Too poignant.’ Arthur realises ‘with a joy bordering on sadism’ that he can ‘deglove every humiliation’ of his character ‘to show it’s risible lining’. And ‘somehow bittersweet longing begins to appear in the novel … It changes, grows kinder … our benevolent god grants his character the brief benediction of joy.’ ‘If only one could do this in real life!’ And this is exactly what Greer does for Less.

The book opens with an unnamed narrator saying: ‘From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad’. And Greer gives him some victories. Another character says to him ‘You’ve bumbled through every moment and been a fool, you’ve misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you’ve won.’ Arthur’s response is of course that he doesn’t feel victorious, he feels defeated. But he isn’t, in fact, the terrible, undeserving person he thinks he is. We know he is a good person from the narrator, who seems to have an overview of Less’s life. I didn’t think much about this narrator at the beginning; it was as if it was just Greer writing about Less. But as the story goes on and Greer inserts the narrator more and more, he or she takes a bigger and finally crucial role. I didn’t guess who he or she was until almost the end of the book, though looking back there are clues there for the more astute reader. These post-modern conceits might in less sure hands – pun intended – have been annoying, but here I think they work very well. As the narrator says, it is a love story.

You can read more about the author and his other five books – four novels and a book of short stories – on his website.