Less Is Lost (Arthur Less #2)

by Andrew Sean Greer

He thinks each day will be better than the next; he is wrong. He awakens the next morning and thinks it again; he is wrong. He thinks we are free to become our true selves, that we are free to love as we choose. A mindset so UnitedStatesian, you could serve it with ketchup.

You could almost have it both ways—you could forgive this Larry, struggling with his cane and Wanda and harbors and restaurants and shopping, his cancer and gays and Jews and assholes, forgive him and let him die forgiven. And still never forgive the one who left.

the truth of existence has not quite pierced his soul: That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It’s nothing but protagonists. It’s protagonists all the way down.

I have never seen America. But I need to, perhaps to understand my partner—his love of colonial-era ketchup and Prohibition-era “root beer,” the Mont Blanc of ice in every sip of water, his terror of talking about race, his fascination with the island of Great Britain and indifference to the continent of Africa, his defense of the Democratic Party, his defense of the Fahrenheit scale, his belief, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary, that we are free to become our true selves, that we are free to love as we choose, that happiness is within our grasp if we reach for it.