Less (Arthur Less, #1)

by Andrew Sean Greer

How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?

But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with “will do”; it’s worse than living with yourself.

Either Less is an asshole, or the heart is a capricious thing. It is not impossible both are true.

the time when any couple has found its balance, and passion has quieted from its early scream, but gratitude is still abundant; what no one realizes are the golden years.

There is his own distant youth, that daily humiliation of rinsing out your one good shirt and putting on your one good smile, along with the daily rush of newness: new pleasures, new people, new reflections of yourself.

The city of youth, the country of age.

He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you. There are some men who have never been kissed like that. There are some men who discover, after Arthur Less, that they never will be again.

Even more mystical: his touch casts a curious spell. There is no other word for it. Perhaps it is the effect of his being “someone without skin” that Less can sometimes touch another and send the spark of his own nervous system into theirs.

His brain sits before its cash register again, charging him for old shames as if he has not paid before.

he has spent a small fortune to dress as Parisians might rather than as they do.

“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.”

A generation apart back then; now they are essentially contemporaries.

Clark always says you can be thin or you can be happy, and, Arthur, I have already tried thin.”

Just as a gay couple cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Marrakech, he thinks, two men, best friends, cannot walk hand in hand down the streets of Chicago. They cannot sit on a dune like these teenagers and watch a sunset in each other’s embrace. This Tom Sawyer love for Huck Finn.

We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding.