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?

Nothing to do but laugh about it. True for everything.

Less finds himself searching for an appropriate prayer. He was, however, raised Unitarian; he has only Joan Baez to turn to, and “Diamonds and Rust” gives no solace.

His face takes on the expression of a bronze-medal winner in a three-man race.

What god has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation, to fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel, in some seventh sense, the minusculitude of his own worth?

Less is not known as a teacher, in the same way Melville was not known as a customs inspector.

In the club, as he later recalls, a woman gets onto the dance floor and really lets go during a Madonna song, really takes over the floor, and people are clapping, hooting, she’s losing her mind out there, and her friends are calling her name: “Peter Pan! Peter Pan!” Actually, it isn’t a woman; it’s Arthur Less.

Less wears a pair of natural leather wingtips, a paint stroke of green on each toe, black fitted linen trousers with a spiraling seam, a gray inside-out T-shirt, and a hoodie jacket whose leather has been tenderly furred to the soft nubbin of an old eraser. He looks like a Fire Island supervillain rapper.

Thanks, life!

“It’s true things can go on till you die. 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. That’s how towns become ghost towns. It’s how houses become junk stores. And I think it’s how people get old.”

Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.

He has nothing personal against Christ; though raised Unitarian—with its glaring omission of Jesus and a hymnal so unorthodox that it was years before Less understood “Accentuate the Positive” was not in the Book of Common Prayer—Less is technically Christian.

And there is his three-year-old daughter, who runs around wearing nothing but a rhinestone necklace (who wouldn’t, if they could?). She is able to count, in English, methodically as a cart climbing uphill, up to the number fourteen—and then the wheels come off: “Twenty-one!” she screams in delight. “Eighteen! Forty-three! Eleventy! Twine!”

It is a New Yorker cartoon fate.

He supposes he is meant to experience humility; by now, he is well acquainted with humility. It is the one piece of luggage he has not lost.

I hadn’t known I needed him there. Like a landmark, a pyramid-shaped stone or a cypress, that we assume will never move. So we can find our way home. And then, inevitably, one day—it’s gone. And we realize that we thought we were the only changing thing, the only variable, in the world; that the objects and people in our lives are there for our pleasure, like the playing pieces of a game, and cannot move of their own accord; that they are held in place by our need for them, by our love. How stupid.