Less Is Lost (Arthur Less #2)

by Andrew Sean Greer

Arthur Less (still decorated with pink fluff) is picked up at the Palm Springs airport by a publicist named Eleanor and taken into Palm Springs proper, where he experiences, in the sudden transition from Northern to Southern California, a shock similar to a diver’s on rising too fast from the depths. Oh, California! The statistically impossible blondness; the ubiquity of sunglasses, as if everyone has just been to the ophthalmologist; the non-native date palms that, like many non-natives, seem positively patriotic about their newfound country; the pretense of sun and warmth in chill October, such as here, in Eleanor’s convertible, where, to counteract the cold, she has turned the heat up high. It feels to Less like the kind of deep act of denial seen only at family holidays.