Less (Arthur Less, #1)

by Andrew Sean Greer

and the three thousand pages of In Search of Lost Time took him five committed summers to finish. And on that fifth summer, when he was lying abed in a friend’s Cape Cod house one afternoon, about two-thirds of the way through the last volume, suddenly, without any warning at all, he read the words The End. In his right hand he held perhaps two hundred pages more—but they were not Proust; they were the cruel trick of some editor’s notes and afterword. He felt cheated, swindled, denied a pleasure for which he had spent five years preparing. He went back twenty pages; he tried to build up the feeling again. But it was too late; that possible joy had departed forever. This was how he felt when Robert left him.

It was about time travel. And they had a scientist on saying that if it were possible, you’d have to build one time machine now. And build another one years later. Then you could go back and forth. A sort of time tunnel. But here’s the thing, Arthur. You could never go any further back than the invention of that first machine. Which I think is really a blow to the imagination. I took it pretty hard.”

Arthur says, “We can never kill Hitler.” “But you know it’s like that already. When you meet people. You meet them, say, when they’re thirty, and you can never really imagine them any younger than that. You’ve seen pictures of me, Arthur, you’ve seen me at twenty.” “You were a handsome guy.” “But really, really, you can’t imagine me any younger than my forties, can you?” “Sure, I can.” “You can picture it. But you can’t quite imagine it. You can’t go back any further. It’s against the laws of physics.”

After choosing the path people wanted, the man who would do, the easy way out of things—your eyes wide in surprise as you see me—after holding it all in my hands and refusing it, what do I want from life? And I say: “Less!”