Less by Andrew Sean Greer (2017)

49-year-old Arthur Less is a writer and man-about-town, come from San Francisco to New York, where he's spent most of his life on the literary scene. Formerly the lover of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Brownburn, his days of unalloyed youth and beauty are behind him. Now it's his turn to be in a doomed relationship with a younger man, Freddy Pelu, the 25-year-old son of his frenemy Carlos. Now 34 and an English teacher, Freddy declares that his boyfriend Tom wants to go monogamous and get married. Feeling as though he'll be humiliated if he goes to the wedding, Arthur gets out of it by accepting any and all invitations to literary events from around the world that come his way. And so begins his little odyssey of heartbreak and misadventure...

I read this for a book club and was a little startled to see that it won the Pulitzer. To be honest upfront, if there's one thing that puts a massive barrier between me and a novel, it's the label "comedy". Part of this is due to the ridiculous plaudits that end up on the cover. I think it was Anthony Burgess who described Finnegans Wake by James Joyce as having "two belly laughs on every page". Even if you're smart enough to read the Wake, are you really laughing that hard and much at it? Less is no exception to this rule. "Mercilessly, unexpectedly, endearingly funny", reads one pull-quote. "You will sob little tears of joy", says another. Will I now?

Needless to say, I wasn't pleading for mercy while sobbing my little heart out. Less is a nice enough book. It has some smile-worthy moments and a few moving ones (its most interesting theme, only glanced at, is how AIDS left behind a generation of gay men without role models for growing old in an age when you can legally be "out"). Its prose is polished and well-wrought; it is, all in all, a well-cobbled piece of light narrative.

It's never any more than that, though, which is why I have to ask why this of all things was chosen for the Pulitzer. The more cynical part of me suspects that it's because the people who judge these things gravitate towards books they see themselves reflected in, while also containing one aspect that they can call "modern". In this case, the fact that it takes place among queer characters. Yet surely there are queer stories more thoughtful and incisive than this gossamer rom-com with the lightest of plots, and characters who seem to be derived from New Yorker cartoons? Less is the work of real talent on a sentence-by-sentence level, but as an overall construction, it's a wee bit ramshackle. Though ostensibly a novel of international travel, for instance, none of the places feels especially unique, and the story’s emotional core doesn't exactly burn bright.

It's ultimately a New York novel even when Less is in, say, Japan or Mexico. The jokes are very much of that Sex and the City, Will & Grace, late '90s sitcom world of people who want to seem bohemian but are in fact just upper-middle-class. Still, it's a breezy enough read, and aware enough of its limits to be brief.