And there will be his last.Ī love story, a satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, by an author The New York Times has hailed as “inspired, lyrical,” “elegiac,” “ingenious,” as well as “too sappy by half,” Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.Īndrew Sean Greer (born 1970) is an American novelist and short story writer. The second phase of life, as he thinks of it, falling behind him like the second phase of a rocket. In between: science fiction fans, crazed academics, emergency rooms, starlets, doctors, exes and, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to see. Well: Arthur will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Sahara sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and arrive in Japan too late for the cherry blossoms. Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face. QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town? On your desk are a series of half-baked literary invitations you’ve received from around the world. You can’t say yes-it would all be too awkward-and you can’t say no-it would look like defeat. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years now engaged to someone else. You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty.

Less sean greer