Less
A mediocre gay novelist travels the world to avoid his ex's wedding. Greer's comic novel is a formally accomplished farce with few equals in recent American fiction. Its lightness is its seriousness; its lightness is what lets it say true things.
Arthur Less circles the globe without changing much, and detractors resent that a man who avoids every hard conversation gets rewarded with a happy ending rather than earning one, chalking the whole thing up to “a privileged, oblivious character” coasting through his own life. Despite constant travel, the pacing reads as slow and anticlimactic to several readers, the countries passing by more as atmosphere than engagement. One blunt reviewer calls the book “surface-level, gay Eat, Pray, Love type of sojourn” rather than a Pulitzer-caliber novel, naming Bellow, Morrison, Roth, and Updike as the writers it doesn't measure up against. Another dismisses it outright as “mediocre skill describing a mediocre writer,” and a third asks flatly, “How did this beach-read earn the Pulitzer Prize for fiction?”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
