Skip to main content

Less Human


Book Review


Title: Less
Author: Andrew Sean Greer
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 261
Price in India: Rs 499

Failure is as multi-faceted as success. You can fail in more ways than you may succeed. “Full many a flower” of Thomas Gray blushed unseen in the desert air, thanks to this universal tendency of failure. A lot of excellent writers end up as bloggers while more mediocre ones become best sellers, also thanks to this same principle. The same can be said of any profession.

Andrew Sean Greer’s novel, Less, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize is about a failed writer called Arthur Less. The blurb asks the question “Who says you can’t run away from your problems?” implying that Less failed because he did not face his problems. He did not, true. Can not-being-able-to-face your problems be one of the many facets of failure?

Take a look at the successes around you. Are they all geniuses? How many mediocre people have risen high, too high, and shone brilliantly there too uttering sheer nonsense that had charming colours, colours of nationalism or something like that?

Arthur Less is not a genius anyway. He is plain mediocre. He is gay too. At least, he should be a good gay in order to succeed as a writer. Or to succeed as anything. Who determines your success? A group of people, right? So, obviously, you should be in the good books of a group. A political party, a religious community, a scholar’s agglomeration, or a local club at least. These are what can declare you a success. Who else?

Arthur Less is not even a good gay. The novel begins with Less’s nine year-lover, Freddy, inviting Less to his wedding with another man. In order to avoid attending the wedding, Less begins to accept all other invitations which he had discarded earlier: to teach in a university as a visiting lecturer, to attend an award ceremony, and so on, all of which turn out to be farces organised by people with motives as ulterior as getting Viagra cheaper. During that journey which takes Less to many countries including India (land of rats and rat snakes and mongooses and parsons and dogs and elephants and all sorts of animals). He is there in each country for all wrong reasons.

Arthur Less is not even a good gay. He could not only retain his handsome gay lover Freddy but also not please any gay lover. Even his novels failed to do justice to the gays. “It is our duty to show something beautiful from our world,” Less is told by a gay reader who admires him. “The gay world. But in your books, you make the characters suffer without reward. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were Republican.” Less’s protagonist Kalipso “washes ashore on an island and has a gay affair for years. But then he leaves to go find his wife!” That doesn’t inspire the gays. “Inspire us, Arthur,” he is told. “Aim higher.”

Aim higher. Means, appease some group or the other. This last conversation which happens in Paris leaves Less feeling that he is not only a bad writer but also a bad lover, a bad friend, a bad son, and “bad at being himself”.

Less did his best to get himself listed in the best sellers under 30, then under 40, and now he is just turning 50 only to realise there is no hope for him to reach that list anymore because 50 is the age when you are too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered.

Time has run out for Less. Life is not going to be kind to you once you run out of your time. Life is tragi-comedy. Less seems to be the kind of a person for whom the first half of life was comedy and the second half tragedy, according to one of the characters. Having made that assessment, the character thinks again. “Not just the first part,” he says. He thinks that Less’s whole life is comedy. “The whole thing. You are the most absurd person I’ve ever met. You’ve bumbled through every moment and been a fool; you’ve misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you’ve won. And you don’t even realize it.”

Well, did Less win? That’s one question. The other is: Has his life been comic or tragic? It depends on from where you look at him. The novel persuades you to look at him from both sides. And it persuades powerfully too. Humorously too. Poignantly too. Green is a good writer.


Green is not an easy writer. You need patience to grasp the depth of this novel precisely because it appears shallow all through when it actually has depths lying concealed all over.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Life of a Transgender

Book Review Title: From Manjunath to Manjamma Authors: B Manjamma Jogathi with Harsha Bhat Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2023 Pages: 171 I had an aversion towards the transgender people I met on the trains during my frequent travels as a younger man. These people came across as rude and vulgar. They would enter the train compartment in a large group, clapping hands loudly, waking up sleeping passengers and insisting on being given generous alms. They would go to the extent of hectoring the passengers, even making physical intrusions like poking and caressing body parts that we won’t let strangers touch. Reading Arundhati Roy’s novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness , a few years ago, made me look at transpersons with some empathy. Anjum, the transperson protagonist, is also a Muslim. Double alienation. Anjum is an undesirable citizen of the country by virtue of being a transperson who is also a Muslim. She is pushed out of the mainstream literally and driven to living i

Hate Politics

Illustration by Copilot Hatred is what dominates the social media in India. It has been going on for many years now. A lot of violence is perpetrated by the ruling party’s own men. One of the most recent instances of venom spewed out by none other than Mithun Chakraborty would shake any sensible person. But the right wing of India is celebrating it. Seventy-four-year-old Chakraborty threatened to chop the people of a particular minority community into pieces. The Home Minister Amit Shah was sitting on the stage with a smile when the threat was issued openly. A few days back, a video clip showing a right-winger denying food to a Muslim woman because she refused to chant ‘Jai Sri Ram’ dominated the social media. What kind of charity is it that is founded on hatred? If you go through the social media for a while, you will be astounded by the surfeit of hatred there. Why do a people who form the vast majority of a country hate a small minority so much? Hatred usually comes from some

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation

Trapped in Pandora’s Shadows

Anjana Alphons George I wanted this to be a guest post from a former student. However, getting this poem from Anjana Alphons George wasn’t quite easy. So this is going to be a hybrid of the guest and the host coming together like the waves and the intertidal zone in the ocean. “I’ve become your fan,” I said to Anjana. She was in grade 10. I wasn’t teaching her since my classes were confined to grades 11 and 12. It was a few years back. Anjana had delivered a speech in the weekly morning assembly. Her speech was entirely different from all the speeches of students I had ever listened to. It sounded impromptu. It carried feelings from the heart. Convictions, rather. It was motivational. Inspiring. It moved goosebumps on my skin. “Your speech was splendid,” I told her when I met her on the corridor later in the day. She became my student in grades 11 and 12 and I watched her grow up into intellectual and emotional maturity. When I asked her to write a guest post on my blog, I ha