Less

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2017) 261 pages

As with anyone that I've just met, it takes a little while for Arthur Less, a 49-year-old white gay guy, a bit of a second-tier writer, to grow on me. He's having a midlife crisis partly because of his upcoming 50th birthday and partly because Freddy, his lover for the past nine years, is going to be married to another guy very soon. Less is invited to the wedding, but rather than just declining the invitation, he ends up accepting every other invitation he can find to take him away from home in San Francisco for many weeks: These invitations include teaching a class in Germany, going on a writing retreat in India, doing a series of tastings for a magazine article in Japan, etc., seven stops in total, all in order to save face and to distract himself.

The writing tone seems just a tad clinical at first, but as Less follows his travel itinerary, the understated humor of the very strange situations that he finds himself in grows progressively funnier. I especially enjoyed the translations of the German which Less speaks while he's in Berlin. (Arthur has been insisting he's fluent in German, but we find otherwise!)

The conversations that Less has with others are often thought-provoking meaning-of-life-and-love kind of philosophies which differ widely. One mystery: the narrator. Little crumbs thrown out from time to time show that the narrator personally knows Less. Who is it??