Less Is Lost (Arthur Less #2)

by Andrew Sean Greer

Of course Robert has not made it; of course there is no ghost. Less realizes he has made the sound himself. For the dead live only in us.

Is Arthur Less a “bad gay”? He’s certainly bad at it.

“Hamburger-hamburger-hamburger.”

Neil Cicerega

(My dear partner, it was Oklahoma! and you know it.)

The problem in the world is that we aren’t kind to one another. It’s kindness and human spirit that drives us. We have one another. That’s all we have. We must celebrate them. Remember that. I don’t care who you love, but if you love someone…if you love someone, you have to love them every day. You have to choose them every day.”

but they are all of a type: Theater People.

“I’m working on a backstory and I want to feel what it was like.” “Being gay?” Thomas smiles. “Being in Delaware.”

I am ashamed to say that Arthur Less is not comfortable with Southern hail-fellow-well-met friendliness. Perhaps because he grew up on the Eastern Seaboard, where affection was kept in the cupboard with the hurricane lamps, or perhaps it was merely because his parents, including a loving mother who, like a famous actor omitting from a script lines she cannot pronounce, simply could not say “I love you.”

What plant could flower under the cold sun of Reagan?

Arthur Less breaks down in racking sobs that are equal parts relived sorrow and musical-theater joy, and show me the homosexual who could sift out which is which.

But reader, there are no coincidences on this journey; there are only the signs we refuse to recognize…