In April 2018, I was following the International Booker Prize (then Man Booker) for the first time, reading political books translated from Arabic and Chinese, post-post modern books translated from Korean and Polish, and some stuff I can’t even explain translated from Hungarian. Less, a novel about an American man’s midlife crisis, wasn’t really on my radar, despite winning the Pulitzer Prize that very month.

I vaguely remember seeing the cover and thinking, that looks like chick lit. These days, I would probably assume it was a “spicy” romance, but these were more innocent times. More specifically, the cover reminded me of a Sophie Kinsella novel, perhaps a gender-swapped Shopaholic. Turns out I wasn’t far off!

Arthur Less peaked early, in writing and in love: his first novel was a critically acclaimed Odyssey retelling, and his first love was a much older, much more successful poet, modelled after Frank O’Hara. Since these early successes, Arthur has become a solidly midlist writer and had several failed romances, the latest with a much younger man. We meet Arthur in the lead up to his fiftieth birthday, and he’s coping well, until his publisher rejects his new novel and he receives a wedding invitation from that latest ex. Arthur accepts a bunch of conveniently outstanding invitations to various speaking engagements, residencies, and writing retreats all over Europe, Africa, and Asia, with two goals: rewrite his novel and avoid his ex’s wedding.

As you might imagine, hijinks ensue. The hijinks actually start before the midlife crisis sets in, and get us off to a rocky start. We meet Arthur in a very silly set up that relies on a misunderstanding that’s exacerbated by a lack of communication, a trope often used by Kinsella and her ilk, but this one committed a cardinal sin of contemporary fiction – pretending phones don’t exist. Missed appointments with no follow up text? Mistaken identity of someone who definitely has a Wikipedia page? Late because of A STOPPED CLOCK? You can’t get away with this shit in 2018!

The ending is also incredibly silly and contrived in a way I can’t really describe due to spoilers. The problem wasn’t the slight “twist” – I saw it coming a mile away, and that was fine, standard in the genre – it was the contrived nature of how it went down. 

There were also Kinsellian aspects that I loved, particularly Arthur’s devotion to bespoke fashion and the heavy symbolism of his “Lessian blue” custom-made suit, which suffers a fate that made me laugh out loud while perfectly reflecting Arthur’s downward spiral. 

Kinsella’s books involve light and silly things like fashion, travel, slapstick comedy, and low-stakes romantic tension, but occasionally transcend the tropes and hit the reader with a sublime sentence or a deep insight. Greer does that too, but in a more sustained manner. Most chapters contain a devastating passage or two. Arthur is clearly a bit of an authorial stand-in, and we’re meant to think he’s a bit pretentious, but there’s substance to back it up. The meta narrative of Arthur’s struggle to rewrite his book while reimagining his life as a no-longer-young man, and the parallels between his first book and his current odyssey across continents (he even gets waylaid by a siren or two) are well-crafted and satisfying. 

Greer takes it a bit too far at times though. Giving the story a frame narrative could have been a nice, literary touch, but there’s an unnecessary mystery about who this extra narrator is (maybe it was obvious to other readers, but not to me), and we snap back to the narrator so rarely that it doesn’t flow well. When the narrator is revealed, it falls apart, as they would not have had access to much of the action, let alone Arthur’s thoughts. It would have been better to just tell the story simply, in close third person, and let the writing shine. 

One of those sublime passages might sound a little cheesy out of context, but it’s important to know that Arthur kisses anyone and everyone like this, making this both dead romantic (only now, only you!) and kind of disconcerting. It’s also very funny when you’ve witnessed Arthur’s delusions about being fluent in German.

“He kisses – how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can only use the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.”

(And on reflection, the use of “I” in the passage makes it screamingly obvious who the narrator is – I’ll take the L on that one!)

Back to April 2018. I was glad to see that the right book won the International Booker: the brilliant Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft. Had I been paying attention to the Pulitzer Prize, I would have been dismayed to see Less win. Despite its high comedy and literary merit, there’s no way it should have won over the devastating, hilarious, and life-changing finalist The Idiot by Elif Batuman, which also happens to have the most perfect last line in contemporary fiction.

Like The Idiot, Less has a sequel, so maybe I’ll give Arthur Less another chance to stick the landing.