We first meet him in New York, where he has the humiliation of chairing a huge event for a wildly successful and wildly overrated science fiction writer. A twink-turned-daddy, he has yet to make the adjustment from kissed to kisser, and wreaks emotional havoc on anyone drawn in by his air of baffled innocence. Less’s undoing, perhaps, is that he has been loved by a genius – he passed his youth as the lover of a celebrated poet – so has fallen into the habit of seeing himself as on the periphery of things. The stealthy genius of this novel is that it simultaneously tells the life story of a basically sweet man whom the industry has eaten alive. Greer mercilessly skewers the insecurity of authors as well as the vanity of the literary industry’s self-absorption in the face of its irrelevance to most people’s lives. They also neatly illustrate the scrabble-and-make-do that most freelance writers must resort to in order to survive, all those little jobs that make you feel like an author but that are not quite writing – “the crazy quilt of a writer’s life: warm enough, though it never quite covers the toes”. The various stages of this journey lend the novel its structure and, as is customary, provide both a parade of colourful characters and a voyage of self-discovery. A twink-turned-daddy, Less has yet to make the adjustment from kissed to kisser Not only will he thus avoid the wedding, but sidestep the pain of turning 50 in company. While still not acknowledging to himself that he was in love all along and that his heart is cracked, if not quite broken, Less accepts a slew of writerly invitations that conveniently slot together to provide a round-the-world trip. The younger man, who happens also to be the son of his arch enemy, announces his engagement to someone else. Less is “an author 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”. It introduces us to minor novelist Arthur Less as he finds himself abruptly single, having coasted through a studiedly casual not-quite-relationship with a vain younger man for several years. “It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.” Greer can afford this moment of metafiction because, by this third act of the novel, his hero has won us over, for all that he enjoys most of the blessings of existence.ĭespite its lampooning of the literary world, Less won this year’s Pulitzer prize for fiction, prompting its publication in Britain. And, you know, his … his sorrows … ” “A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows?” replies his lesbian friend. “It was about a middle-aged gay man walking around San Francisco. T wo thirds of the way through Andrew Sean Greer’s latest novel, he risks letting his novelist hero – white, gay, knocking 50 – describe his latest novel, which has been turned down by his publisher.
0 kommentar(er)
