Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

Just finished Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, and I'm filled with joy thinking about that novel.

I picked it up a couple of weeks ago, because my sister left a copy here when she went back to Europe, and because I needed to read a couple more books from top-flight authors for the year. It turns out I knew about the book, slightly, because Craig Mazin had read out an excerpt from it last year in the Scriptnotes podcast, and as a further bit of synchronicity, a local bookstore has a poster for one of Greer's previous books, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, up on the wall of their bathroom.

The premise is lovely - to avoid having to attend an ex-boyfriend's wedding, which also takes place on his fiftieth birthday, middling novelist Arthur Less starts accepting invitations from all kinds of half-baked literary events across the world. As he has indignity after indignity heaped upon him from New York to Mexico City to Turin, Berlin to Paris, Marrakech, India and Tokyo, he also remembers his own life as the companion to a much more celebrated poet, and comes to terms with his circle of friends aging - something that wasn't promised, given they came up and came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis.

Even more lovely is the language. In Berlin Less is enlisted to teach a brief course at a university, which he calls "Read Like a Vampire, Write Like Frankenstein". The narrator describes Less having the students assemble words from favorite novels, translate a novel's opening from English to German and back until it's unrecognizable, and at the end says they may not have learned about literature, but have been given back the love of language that made them literature students in the first place.

This love of language shines through the whole book, from the description of Arthur Less's kissing ("like a man who knows only the present tense of a new language - only you, only now" [sic]) to the aforementioned passage read out on Scriptnotes, which deals with the difficulty of being the non-famous partner of a writer considered a genius.

But what makes it such a wonderful book is that the language, while erudite, flows effortlessly, making it a quick read, an enjoyable one and also an intelligent one. And a funny one - I don't know the rest of Greer's oeuvre, but here he draws on the likes of PG Wodehouse in using an impressive command of the language to make you laugh. Certain lines ("Let us never find out") made me laugh out loud, which other funny novels don't always manage.

One other thing that may make the book resonate for me is the theme on aging. Less spends the book ruminating on what it means to have gotten to fifty without the desired success in matters professional, financial or romantic, and when the date comes finds it an anti-climax. I'm not gay, a novelist (yet) or fifty (yet), but I did hit forty this year, and at the time found myself thinking back over the previous 20 years or so, trying to make sense of the tapestry of experiences I'd had up until then. It was hard to pinpoint any really major successes, but had to acknowledge a certain satisfaction with my travels, my years living abroad, and various other achievements.

Less has a similar trajectory, as he's faced with the prospect of being interviewed onstage by the ex-wife of his famous, genius lover, or of the possibility that he's killing the literati of Berlin with boredom, or even the dissolution of a friend's marriage that he'd previously thought rock-solid. He's looking back on all those experiences and trying to pull them into a coherent narrative of what his life has meant, a task made more urgent by the approach of the milestone that says you're old, and the need to adjust to the reality that there is actually life after fifty (or, in my case, forty).

But perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay the book is that it reminded me of how much I love writing, and got me back on track with my own work. There's something wonderful about reading a narrative by someone who knows the language as intimately as Andrew Sean Greer, and having it remind you how much you love the language too. I wish I could read it again for the first time.