Have you ever been on a vacation the place you spend the entire time coveting your companion’s ebook? Just a few years in the past, I spent a protracted weekend in France with a good friend who smirked and hooted every time she picked up Much lessby Andrew Sean Greer, a satirical novel a couple of globetrotting “minor American novelist” who will attend any minor literary occasion so as to keep away from his ex-boyfriend’s marriage ceremony. I used to be making my means by a chunk of experimental prose about chemical castration that I used to be reviewing, casting envious glances from my sunlounger.
So after I heard that Greer had despatched his hapless hero, Arthur Much less, “Sancho Panza-ing” throughout the US for a sequel, I chucked each books within the suitcase, satisfied I’d assured myself hours of thigh-slapping, slack-jawed glee. My good friend, I ought to add, was not alone in her verdict. Much less gained the 2018 Pulitzer prize for fiction (the competitors included George Saunders’s Lincoln within the Bardo) and has been hailed by Armistead Maupin and David Sedaris in essentially the most ecstatic phrases.
I wouldn’t say a double dose of Much less’s literary peregrinations ruined my summer season vacation. However the expertise of studying Greer’s prose was not not like watching my good friend snigger at it. I simply didn’t get what was so humorous. Nor was I charmed by the clueless protagonist, a person who believes he's “the primary gay ever to develop previous” however who in literary phrases is “as superfluous as the additional a in quaalude”.
The sequel (apparently Greer’s agent counselled towards writing one) sees our “slapstick, ridiculous, zigzagging queer” set off on an implausible cross-country odyssey after the loss of life of an ex-lover, whose property serves him with a invoice for again lease on the San Francisco condo the place he lived for 10 years. Much less has three months to search out the cash. Cue a scramble from the Californian coast, throughout the south and again up the japanese seaboard to his native Delaware. As soon as once more, Much less attends kooky literary gigs, sits by farcical prize committees and finds himself on the mercy of the science-fiction author HHH Mandern. Naturally, there's a pug canine referred to as Dolly to deal with, in addition to a donkey, a whale and a moose.
As with Much less, this voyage of contrived epiphanies is narrated within the putative current by the hero’s youthful on-off boyfriend, Freddy Pelu, whose identification was solely revealed on the finish of the primary ebook. However what begins as a race towards the clock turns into a narrative about parental schisms and forgiveness. Mandern is looking for his estranged daughter; Much less is being pursued by his long-lost German father. However even after we find out about Much less being deserted in childhood, the melancholy of the novel by no means feels fairly traced to its supply.
The issue is that the hero is way lower than the sum of his elements: one half Peter Pan, one half Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, one half John Updike’s Henry Bech and a splash of Bertie Wooster. It sounds winsome and enjoyable. It finally ends up mannered and self-satisfied (a standard pressure in North American liberal humour, I discover: see additionally, Sedaris, Patrick deWitt, the bits of the New Yorker that got down to be humorous). The extra Pelu instructed me to “Have a look at Arthur Much less”, the much less I may make him out. Our hero’s idiocy – rooted in his incuriosity about different people – is likely to be funnier have been it conveyed with the primal innocence of a Wooster, or informed by a extra impartial narrator. However from the angle of an indulgent lover, it’s too self-conscious, too cute – and the fixed entreaties let an excessive amount of daylight in on the comedy. As if dawningly conscious of this, Greer threads in a story about Much less unwittingly stealing alternatives that ought to have gone to a Black author and his namesake. Nevertheless it feels tacked on; a message about white male privilege so as to justify reprising his hero.
As a mild literary satire, Much less Is Misplaced generally hits the mark. I tittered on the prize committee (“This prize will not be for these youngsters who win all the pieces only for placing pussy within the first paragraph”, one decide rants) and smiled on the director of a theatre firm: “I'm certain you will have heard of our six-hour efficiency of To the Lighthouse (I personally performed the Lighthouse) and our eight-hour efficiency of Gravity’s Rainbow (I personally performed the Rainbow).”
However the good gags find yourself buried below all of the pointless pratfalls and unbelievable pickles. It’s like opening an overstuffed suitcase to search out there’s little right here you actually need.
Much less Is Misplaced by Andrew Sean Greer is printed by Little, Brown (£16.99). To assist the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Supply prices might apply
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