Less (Arthur Less, #1)

by Andrew Sean Greer

but by raising his voice he has lost;

“Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours,”

Stein

Was Gertrude Stein gay? Or different stein?

“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.” “Yes! It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.”

meet new friends, and they are bald or they are gray. And I don’t know what color their hair used to be.”

with a bit of a belly but an easy demeanor that promised escape from heartbreak,

Ask me.

Ask me and I will stay.

Easy to foget how subject ones desires are to the simple ennunciation of them.

It is, after all, almost a miracle they are here. Not because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes.

As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.

we each got to make one rule about the road trip. Mine was that we could only sleep in places with a neon sign. His was that wherever we went, we had to eat the special. If they didn’t have a special, we had to find another place. Oh my God, Arthur, the things I ate! One time the special was crab casserole. In Texas.” “I know, I know, you told me about it. That trip sounded great.” “It was maybe the best road trip we’ve ever taken; we just laughed and laughed the whole way. Looking for neon signs. And then we got to Texas and he kissed me good-bye and got on a plane back home, and

:-) -> :-(

And people use the same old table, even though it’s falling apart and it’s been repaired and repaired, just because it was their grandmother’s.

Love isn’t terrifying like that. It’s walking the fucking dog so the other one can sleep in, it’s doing taxes, it’s cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It’s having an ally in life. It’s not fire, it’s not lightning.

breath unevenly. She turns to him: “What if one day you meet someone, Arthur, and it feels like it could never be anyone else? Not because other people are less attractive, or drink too much, or have issues in bed, or have to alphabetize every fucking book or organize the dishwasher in some way you just can’t live with. It’s because they aren’t this person. This

To travel to the other side of the world—only to be offered a brand he could so easily buy at home.

‘What could be more important than love?’”

You are the most absurd person I’ve ever met.

You’ve bumbled through every moment and been a fool; you’ve misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you’ve won. And you don’t even realize it.”

He had aged without growing old:

“That is just my mother,” the proprietress says, sighing. “She thinks she is still the boss. We give her a fake calendar to make reservations. The phone also is fake.

It was one of the grandest and most dismaying experiences in Less’s life—Marcel Proust, that is—and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish.

Perhaps he was burning down a house in which he no longer wanted to live.

There is that scene at the end of Proust when our narrator, after many years out of society, arrives at a party furious no one told him it’s a costume party; everyone is wearing white wigs! And then he realizes. It isn’t a costume party. They have simply grown old. And here, looking at his first love, the first wife—surely they’re kidding! But the joke goes on too long. Robert keeps breathing heavily. Marian does not smile. No one is kidding.

greets each dish with a mad smile, recognizing the spiral nature of being, Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return.

Has he lost his mind, or is everything a reflection?

I hadn’t known that I assumed he would wait there forever in that white bed below his window. I hadn’t known I needed him there.

Tomorrow, love will surely deepen its mystery. All that, tomorrow. But tonight, after a long journey: rest.