Host: Some of you may be familiar with a novelist called Arthur Less, a minor American novelist to be precise. He's the hero of Andrew Sean Greer's novel called Less. He's a man whose biggest talent seems to be taking a problem, and making it five times worse. Less was a best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which is pretty rare for a book as Funny as Less.

In Andrew Sean Greer's sequel Less is Lost, Arthur Less has now fallen on hard times and so he takes on a series of gigs to make ends meet, which turns into a kind of road trip across the United States.

Andrew Sean Greer: It was right after the 2016 presidential election and I just thought, oh, there's something I don't understand. Let me go right into that because my family is from the south and I thought I don't understand where family's from. Apparently, the challenge was this time not how to write joy on the page, but how to write about my country. Honestly, that was what was constantly in my mind.

Host: Andrew Sean Greer just talked with our staff writer Parul Sehgal.

Parul Sehgal: One of the things I love about talking about Less and Less is Lost with other readers is this shy expression takes over their faces and they'll just say how much they enjoyed it as if pleasure is this subversive feeling that we've forgotten we can get this from literary fiction. As I was reading this I was like, "Why don't I read more books like this? Why do I laugh so infrequently when I'm reading this? What is it about the comic novel? Why don't we see more of them? Why do they feel so rare?"

Andrew Sean Greer: That's a tough question because when people ask me my influences, I end up saying, actually I only have a couple of comic novels that I really love. I think I thought I needed to be a serious writer, is a sin, it's sinful. We're supposed to be learning something important through serious thought, not through someone's manipulation of our sense of humor and taking us across it. Yet I know that some of my favorite books, the ones I held dear and reread are like Grand Green's Entertainments, I don't reread his colonial adventure books. I reread [unintelligible 00:02:17].

Parul Sehgal: I think that is right, we also have to be conscious of ourselves as learning. It's just a shame because, when I think about the comic novel as you were writing them, they're fantastic covers. Charm is a terrific cover for all kinds of things that one can do and that you are up to. One of the things that struck me as I was reading Less is Lost is how interested he becomes in his journey in his own whiteness. It becomes a book about whiteness, which I don't think I've seen reviews pick up on in fact.

Andrew Sean Greer: I thought a lot about it. Like, okay, I'm writing a book about a white gay guy going through the South, what I don't want to have is the road trip story where he goes to a Black church and comes to understanding about race. That's wildly offensive. What I'm going to do is treat each side person as a real person.

You can't just have someone walk in and pour coffee and walk out and only have a beehive hairdo and funny glasses that's not moral. In some strange way, I was like, you have to spend time to make that a real person.

Parul Sehgal: To go to the idea of comedy and charm, they can be a bit of a cover. I was thinking about, your following up your Pulitzer Prize-winning book Less with Less is Lost. There's so much to enjoy and love about these books that are about love, but they're also positioning themselves as a story about America. I want to hear you talk a little bit more about that and more about what the novel can do when you're thinking about telling the story of a country, that may be an article can't or an essay, or a non-fiction book. Where can the novel take us?

Andrew Sean Greer: That was the challenge how do you talk about something so big and amorphous that is changing underneath your feet? Luckily I think a novelist can bring it to you, can first of all not answer it. I feel like an article sometimes feels they have to come up with a thesis about it. I have a check writer show up at the beginning of the book and say, "Americans never ask themselves what if the whole idea is wrong," we don't.

We just keep saying, "How can we fix this?" What if it was flawed from the beginning I don't have an answer to that. I just wanted to think about it as I did my trip and as I wrote about trip and see whether a gay man could feel at home in these places where he's not supposed to be. Whether anyone really feels at home in a country that's so vast, you surely feel out of home somewhere, and how we're going to hold together. Which was also about the relationship between Arthur and Freddy, our narrator, whether they can hold together.

Parul Sehgal: I think that notion of how to persist without answers is so central to the book both in the sense of the American experiment, but also this is profoundly a book about middle age and about this relationship whose code word is uncertain and uncertainty. How do you persist without scripts and without answers? I think this brings me to some of the scenes that I found most moving in this book that I feel like I actually haven't seen.

I am sure they exist elsewhere in novels, I certainly haven't seen them enough. That's conversations between different generations of gay men, and that to me I was like this is different. Freddy's of a certain age, Arthur's a bit older, and then there's Arthur's lover who's passed away and you see three different lives, or three different sets of questions, three different sets of fears, anxieties. Tell me about staging these kinds of conversations and this kind of relationship. Was it conscious?

Andrew Sean Greer: That was the setup that I got to bring with me from Less, because it interested me to have a character who'd been the younger lover suddenly get older and become the older lover. Then I realized I had set up three different generations of gay men. I am very aware of those completely different approaches to life. I hear my generation of men in their around 50 expressing displeasure at watching younger gay men. Often what it is, is that there's envy at the freedom that we fought for and that they take for granted.

We also have to realize there's another generation older than us that went through things we can't even imagine and we should be grateful. Sometimes on the internet you see I'm referred to as a queer elder, which is an honor, I just hadn't thought of myself that way yet. I have to prepare for that, that's where I'm going and there is some respect, but then there's often frustration. For instance, in my generation, we often think of ourselves as not being people of privilege because we lived through the AIDS pandemic and getting beat up and no one being out.

Yet we have now if we look at ourselves, we actually are creatures of privilege. It is hard to make that shift, I think a lot and see what we need to change inside and also let other people into the rights that we have fought for and won, not just bring the ladder up and say like, "All right, we're going to [unintelligible 00:07:49] island and that's it."

Parul Sehgal: When you started writing this character, Arthur, he was older than you, and you've gotten older and closer in age to him. Do you relate to him differently?

Andrew Sean Greer: I definitely do. Although he clearly, even the way I'm dressed today, I look exactly like the cover art.

Parul Sehgal: Oh my God, you absolutely do.

Andrew Sean Greer: Which I just did by accident.

Parul Sehgal: This is absurd.

Andrew Sean Greer: I definitely give him stories from my life and my deepest humiliations and the story of his first kiss is exactly what my first kiss was like, but I don't think of him as me because now I'm older than him and I look at him more like a cousin of some kind who is more innocent than I, and sweeter but also blind and clumsy and causing pain to other people. That's a nice position to be in as a novelist because I have enough distance to deal with him as a different person. I think I'd be cruel to myself than I-- I'm pretty cruel to him, I have to say, I put him in a hurricane.

Parul Sehgal: Yes, you put him through a lot, but it's not punishing. It's loving, it's indulgent. It's all of these things. His hopelessness and Freddy's voice are the real engines of this book for me. I don't know if you've been paying attention to the churning conversations, these conversations aren't new, but they seem to be picking up again in terms of queer literature about how to balance trauma and joy. What is the role of the novelist?

What is the role of the novel in telling these stories? What is a truthful account? Is it the account that is unsparing and full of pain? What does that leave out, does that leave out stories of lightness and love and everything else? I'm wondering are such concerns in the room with you when you sit down and write?

Andrew Sean Greer: I think I'm abstractly aware of that, but I know for certain that my project for myself is to try to think of traumatic things of my story really and make them a funny story. Not just because that would be fun, but also too-- It's only funny if you realize the person turned out okay, they're over it. They've transformed it. Because for me, what's often left out of queer fiction, or at least when I was a teenager it was like the eighties and nineties was what I found was that always the tool was a defiant sense of joy.

We were out on the streets protesting the war, but the signs would say, Phish nets not fighter jets, US out of the war. We were funnier than they were and that was our tool. We were always going to be funnier than the defense department. We'd win the media. That was like a revolution in protests. It's always been a tactic and I think a really successful one. I'm not witty and cruel. I think that it could go that way. I think just to say, it doesn't matter. Life's full of joy anyway. I always felt that, and I wanted that to be in the book.

Parul Sehgal: Another tactic that's in the book is Arthur does think about and encounters all kinds of stories, stories of pain and stories of difficulties, especially as he's traveling, but it's not explicitly political. You don't identify-- For example, I think I was reading this somewhere, we don't see like naga hats, we don't see anything identified quite so literally and explicitly. Tell me about your decision to not take that tack, which could have been very easily. To go and lampoon certain people and make it very very explicit, but you don't do that. Tell me about how you decided to handle this part of the story.

Andrew Sean Greer: Well, I think two things. One, I think that's well covered. There's plenty of that. I think that the late-night shows do already an excellent job and there's of lamping something terrifying that's happening in the country. I think it's also a very personal thing, which is that I'm actually not good in the mode of anger or rant, or rage. That comes through in the book, because there's books that you need that you write for right now.

Let's read it right now. It's about right now. Then there's books where I'm thinking, I hope this is, you could read this 10 years from now and that it would still be relevant. If I put something that's about right now, it will have changed already. Just even writing the book everything has changed under me. I didn't have to change the book because I didn't nail it down.

Parul Sehgal: There's a way that-- As I was reading this, I was like, this book is trying to prepare me for things. I had this funny feeling and I was like, "What is it preparing me for?" Then there's that conversation between Arthur and the wife of his lover after his lover died, his ex-lover long ago, and they're talking about the death of the ex. Someone says, "Oh, it's shocking." Arthur goes, "No, no, it's not shocking. I knew it was coming. I just didn't prepare myself properly." There's a sense of the way that you talk so much, you talk, but through Arthur, so many characters in this book keep talking about attention, pay attention, look at things, don't become blase to beauty and to kindness.

Tell me a little bit about your relationship with the idea of attention and then this book's preoccupation with attention as a certain kind of ethical position. As a moral imperative attention.

Andrew Sean Greer: That's exactly what I think. It's what I tell my students. If you be it an artist of some kind or even just an ethical person, it means being vulnerable to the world. It also means being open to a place where you didn't see beauty or variety or specificity. I read every graffiti in every bathroom I go to because it's just-- I read the name of the air freshener because it makes it a real place I went to, not for a story of any kind, but just so that I'm actually in the world and I see that humans were here before me, and some person in a corporation chose the name Old Linen as their air freshener spray for some reason. I just try to think about that person.

Parul Sehgal: You think a lot about this person. You're there reading bathroom graffiti. You are awake to all the delights and absurdities of life. Arthur is thinking a little bit about his career, right? Arthur's feeling a little bit about what does it mean to be at midlife his position in the world. He thinks a great deal about success. It's a wonderful standup of what it means to think about success, what it means to be a writer. I'm wondering how you think about success. Whether or not you are defining it differently, having written about Arthur, having had the incredible success of Less, and now of this book. Has it changed for you how you define what it means to be a writerly success?

Andrew Sean Greer: The response I got to Less, first of all, no one expected me to win that Pulitzer Prize, and then no one expected that to be a best seller in the way it was. Having had five books before that I know what's normal. I didn't come into it and be like, I'm a genius. I was like, the same writer I was for five months and something different happened here that is definitely part chance, that is chance. Success can't be being lucky like that, doesn't make any sense.

Success has to be-- This is a corny thing to say, reaching readers that you hadn't been able to reach before, that feels like success to me, because I know things go up and down, I've seen it all. If I'm defining success as the New York Times Best Seller list, I'm setting myself up for a lot of problems. If my success is that it reaches those other people, and I know also for every writer there's the private success of having made the thing that was in your head. If you can do that the other things are not as important to you. You're like, I did my job. The world either does their job or they don't.

Parul Sehgal: Is this the end of the road for Arthur and you, or is there another installment?

Andrew Sean Greer: There's not immediately an installment, but I feel I have such-- It's such a great voice for me to write in if I'm going through something that I can't find another way to get at it, but I'm not writing another Arthur Less novel at the moment. I can't imagine where he go now. Antarctica, doesn't sound like a fun novel.

Parul Sehgal: I don't think he has a lot of fun. I think he's--

Andrew Sean Greer: That is true. It doesn't matter where he goes. I suppose.

Parul Sehgal: He takes Arthur with him everywhere he goes.

Host: That's staff writer Parul Sehgal talking with Andrew Sean Greer, author of the novel Less, and its sequel Less is Lost.

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