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In a world where most people read one book a year, there is a lot of money hoping that this is the book and that this night will be the glorious kickoff.
How can so many things become a bore by middle age—philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods—but heartbreak keeps its sting?
But heartbreak—how can you avoid it except to renounce love entirely? In the end, that is the only solution Arthur Less could find.
This came after a long period of living with the older poet Robert Brownburn, a tunnel of love he entered at twenty-one and exited, blinking in the sunlight, in his thirties.
He swore he would not give it to anyone; he would enjoy it. He would enjoy it alone. But: how to live alone and yet not be alone?
But once you’ve actually been in love, you can’t live with “will do”; it’s worse than living with yourself.
Sad young Arthur Less had become sad old Arthur Less.
Less’s latest novel has been living with his publisher for over a month, as any modern couple lives together before a marriage, but surely his publisher will pop the question any day now.
You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And he feels none; he feels only the shiver of delight when there is nobody around to judge you.
It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, “Honey, I don’t know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry,” and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show.
I fear Less is about to become very relatable
Here is a shop that sells only zippers. Here are twenty of them. The Zipper District. What a glorious city.
A man he almost stayed with, almost loved, and now he does not even recognize him on the street.
Kalipso: a retelling of the Calypso myth from The Odyssey, with a World War II soldier washed ashore in the South Pacific and brought back to life by a local man who falls in love with him and must help him find a way back to his world, and to his wife back home.
and where can I read it???
“It’s an honor to be in love with you.”
and Champion ended by calling the author himself “a magniloquent spoony.” Less stared at those words like a child taking a test. Magniloquent sounded like praise (but was not). But a spoony? What the hell was a spoony? “It’s like a code,” Less said. “Is he sending messages to the enemy?” He was. “Arthur,” Robert said, holding his hand, “he’s just calling you a faggot.”
Back in his room, he is surprised to find, in the Lilliputian bathroom, a Brobdingnagian tub.
Lmao???
Perhaps Less, alone, is kidding. Here, looking at his clothes—black jeans for New York, khaki for Mexico, blue suit for Italy, down for Germany, linen for India—costume after costume. Each one is a joke, and the joke is on him: Less the gentleman, Less the author, Less the tourist, Less the hipster, Less the colonialist. Where is the real Less? Less the young man terrified of love? The dead-serious Less of twenty-five years ago? Well, he has not packed him at all. After all these years, Less doesn’t even know where he’s stored.
I was twelve or so and very bored at an adult party.
Literally who are you
Strange, though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.
Wait. Arthur you might be on to something.
“There follows, I am sad to say, a very long ride on a very slow road…to your final place of rest.” He sighs, for he has spoken the truth for all men. Less understands: he has been assigned a poet.
Just sex and a smile: Isn’t it wonderful to get what you want and pay no price?
All he knows is that he has been fooled into returning to Mexico, to the scene of the crime, to be impaneled before the world beside the woman he has wronged. Marian Brownburn, with a microphone. Surely this is how gay men are judged in Hell.
Did you love it, the rain dance every day? Only when it rained.
Waste every day, that’s what I say.”
The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.
something called a “confrontation” with high school students,
Oh well that’s a nightmare
Why do today’s young men insist on marrying? Was this why we all threw stones at the police, for weddings?
and Robert, in his gray silk suit, readied himself to stride onto a pink-lit stage below the ruins of the centuries, and let go of his lover’s hand like someone falling from a cliff…
Time for his rubber bands.
In the suburbs of Delaware, spring meant not young love and damp flowers but an ugly divorce from winter and a second marriage to buxom summer.
How has it come to this? 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?
I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you never will.
Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage. Because of this, they learn to love their teacher.
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.
Like Claudius with Hamlet’s father, he is ear poisoning the people of Berlin.
and what the Bavarian in his arms is whispering is true, and everyone, everyone—even Arthur Less—is loved.
“Is that what you want on your grave? He went to Paris and didn’t do one extravagant thing?” Later, he wondered if the extravagant thing was the jacket or Freddy.
Here, all this time, Less thought he was merely a bad writer. A bad lover, a bad friend, a bad son. Apparently the condition is worse; he is bad at being himself.
He must have been lonely a long time to stand before Arthur Less and ask such a thing.
“A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows?” “Jesus, I guess so.” “Arthur. Sorry to tell you this. It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.” “Even gay?” “Even gay.”
Good to know there is always a later camel.
Zohra’s voice comes loudly from her camel: “Shut the fuck up! Enjoy the fucking sunset on your fucking camels! Jesus!”
So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.
To Less, it seems so foreign. It makes him sad. In his world, he never sees straight men doing this. 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.
No, Arthur, no, it’s the opposite! I’m saying it’s a success. Twenty years of joy and support and friendship, that’s a success. Twenty years of anything with another person is a success.
He is grieving, for sure—the loss of his lover, his career, his novel, his youth—so why not cover the mirrors, rend the fabric over his heart, and just let himself mourn? Perhaps he should try alone.
“She fell in love. She lost her mind.”
know there’s no love of your life. 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. It’s what she always had with me. Isn’t it? But what if she’s right, Arthur? What if the Sicilians are right? That it’s this earth-shattering thing she felt? Something I’ve never felt.
Yes, surely Mr. Pelu is folding. Surely this is why he never calls to wish Less a happy birthday.
Poor less
