It comes late, and when it lands, we see Less in an entirely different light. I don’t want to give away the twist here it’s the essence of the book. But I think it’s hard to feel bad for this Swift fellow of yours.” And yet, roam though Less might, he must confront what he, like everyone, knows too well: no matter where you go, there you are. “These walk-around-town books, these day-in-the-life stories,” his agent tells him, “I know writers love them.

His own most recent novel, Swift, has been rejected by his publisher. To dodge his troubles, Less embarks on a series of travels, accepting an award he never knew existed, attending a literary festival in Mexico. On the other, it becomes a kind of picaresque. On the one hand, Greer’s novel is a deft and funny satire about what it is to be a writer, all the scorekeeping and jockeying, the concerns about measuring up. What I mean is that Less is deep into avoidance: of his stalled career, the dismays of aging, but also something more emotionally distressing, the impending wedding of his former boyfriend.

But it is also a MacGuffin in the most classic sense. The interview is a money gig, of course it is, or a way of staying visible. As the novel begins, he has come to New York to do an onstage interview with “famous science fiction author H.H.H. Less, after all-the fictional creation, that is, as opposed to the fiction Greer has written-is nothing if not hapless, a gay man on the cusp of 50, whatever promise he may have had (his first book was a “moderate success”) now a memory, if not an albatross. This article appears in Issue 22 of Alta Journal. That makes this first sentence absolutely necessary and yet also absolutely subtle: an element that establishes, or hints at, certain possibilities a setting of the stage for what’s to come. Less himself may not narrate Greer’s comic novel, but the narrator is also a character, or will be revealed as one. From where I sit,” Andrew Sean Greer begins his 2018 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Less, “the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.” It’s an almost perfect opening.

Less pulitzer