Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 novel Less is a frenetic and often hilarious account of “minor American novelist” Arthur Less navigating zany twists of fate during a series of literary engagements across the globe. Less bounces from Mexico to Morocco to India, jet-setting in a bid to distract himself from romantic turmoil back home. Absurdity and playfulness are the crowd-pleasing hallmarks – and the same is largely true of the follow-up, Less Is Lost.
Our narrator, Freddy Palu, is Less’s boyfriend. He recounts one of Arthur’s bizarre interludes early on, in the course of researching a travel piece. “For local detail and colour [Less] headed to a hot springs recommended by his lodge … He came upon the springs, peeled off his clothes and settled naked into the pool … very quietly but startlingly … an enormous moose came out of the forest, walked over and sat beside him in the pool … Less urinated freely in pure terror. And yet, in those few minutes, as man and moose, they watched the setting sun, and Arthur Less felt chosen … when it left him ... when the moose-moment had passed ... Less accepted that he could survive anything … to hell with doubt and worry.”
But “doubt and worry” can’t be jettisoned for long; indeed, they are the pillars of Less’s characterisation. Anxiety, as much as anything else, propels his picaresque progress through this road-trip novel. Rehashing the formula of the first outing, Less is on a journey here too, after an unexpected death and financial oversights leave him in dire straits.
However, as Greer notes, “fast turns Fortune’s wheel!” Things look up when Less is commissioned to write a lucrative profile of eccentric novelist HH Mandern – also featured in the first book – and heads to Palm Springs. The notorious Mandern, “with his rock-star behaviour”, precipitates a madcap chain of events.
Travelling in Mandern’s RV, and accompanied by “crazy-ass” pug Dolly, Less passes through the Mojave desert to Santa Fe, up along the Mississippi, through Alabama and Georgia, to his home town and beyond. While an acidic wit in the vein of David Sedaris is ever present, Greer’s attention to the sublimity of the changing landscape – “the intricate tooled leatherwork of a mountainside … the varying bars of tangerine and coral that linger in the sky” – introduces softer notes.
Less’s odyssey also involves a roving theatre troupe who are staging one of his works. There are ambivalent run-ins between Less and his estranged father as, still in pursuit of cash, he begins a lecture tour.
As he travels, Less encounters sites of a mythologised America: new-age communes, eccentric trailer parks. Sketches of sticky dive bars overseen by quick-witted bartenders allow Greer to send up Less’s self-conscious metropolitan sensibilities. In tandem with these screwball high jinks, the novel consistently evokes Less’s insecurities about his literary talents, as well as Freddy’s misgivings about his often solipsistic lover.
Like its predecessor, then, Less Is Lost combines poignancy in Less’s personal life with gags to keep us entertained (the one about the electric razor and Less’s unfortunate pink sweater is side-splitting). Given the similarities, the reader might justifiably wonder: why resuscitate Less?
Greer’s attempts to give his sequel distinction largely rest on an intermittent inquiry into the state of the nation, and the confounding brutality of the distant and recent past. Reflecting on the unpredictability of Less’s adventures, Palu asks: “Who knows why anything happens in America?” Less’s stop-offs include a visit to a plantation museum, with this strand of the text illuminating uncertainty about the future of a country whose history is so bloodied. The anxieties prompted by Less’s acknowledgment that later life stretches before him like the California deserts he traverses are matched by Greer’s anxieties about what lies in store for the United States in its post-Trumpian, Biden-era malaise.
But this interrogation of Americanness and speculation about where the country might go next feel tepid and incomplete. Greer’s narrative never comes close to answering Palu’s weighty question; romcom kookiness wins out in the end. Of course, an indeterminate rather than shouty evaluation of the current nature of the American project has its place in an ostensibly lighthearted novel. But it seems that in Greer’s desire to offer both levity and political profundity, something was lost indeed.
• Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer is published by Little, Brown (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
