The New Yorker Radio Hour - In Defense of the Comic Novel: Andrew Sean Greer Talks “Less is Lost”

Episode Date: October 14, 2022

Arthur Less is a novelist—a “minor American novelist,” to be precise. He’s a man whose biggest talent seems to be taking a problem and making it five times worse. And he’s the hero of Andrew Sean Greer’s novel “Less,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, an especially rare feat for a comic novel.   Andrew Sean Greer is now out with a sequel, “Less Is Lost,” which takes Arthur on a road trip across the U.S. He talks with the staff writer Parul Sehgal.  Plus, for thirty years, the poet Ellen Bass has taken the same walk almost every day, on West Cliff Drive, a road along the ocean in Santa Cruz, California. Friends and family have teased her for being stuck in her ways, so she wrote the poem “Ode to Repetition,” about taking the same walk, listening to the same songs, and doing the same daily tasks, as life marches toward its end. (This segment originally aired May 26, 2017.) New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. 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 bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. which is pretty rare for a book as funny as Les. 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. 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 my 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. Andrew Sean Greer just talked with our staff writer, Parles Sagle. One of the things I love about talking about less and less is lost with other readers is this shy expression kind of takes over their faces and they'll just say how much they enjoyed it,

pleasure is this subversive feeling that we've forgotten we can get this from literary fiction. But 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? I mean, that's a tough question because I, when people ask me my influences, I end up saying, like, actually, I only have a couple of comic novels that I really love. and I think, well, I think I thought I needed to be a serious writer. It's a sin. You know, 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. And yet I know that some of my favorite books, the ones I hold dear and reread, are like Grand Greens' entertainments. I don't reread his colonial adventure books. I reread travels by aunt. Yeah, I think that's really, I think that's right. And we also have to be conscious of ourselves as learning.

And it's just shame because, you know, when I think about the comic novel and the comic novel as you were writing them, you know, they're a fantastic cover. Charm is a terrific cover for all kinds of things that one can do and that you are up to, you know? And one of the things that struck me as I was reading Les's Lost is how. interested he becomes in his journey in his own whiteness, and it becomes a book about whiteness, which I don't think I've seen reviews pick up on, in fact. I thought a lot about it. Like, okay, I'm writing a book about, like, a white gay guy going through the South.

What I don't want to have is the road trip story where he goes to, like, a black church and comes to understanding about race. Like, 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 that they only have like a beehive hairdo and funny sunglasses. Like that's not moral, you know, like in some strange way. I was like that you have to spend time to make that a real person. I mean, to go to the

idea of comedy and charm sort of being, they can be a bit of a cover. I was thinking about, you know, you're following up your Pulitzer Prize winning book Les with Less is Lost. And there's there's so much to enjoy and love about these books that are about love, but they're also, you know, positioning themselves as a story about America, you know. 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, you know, that maybe an article can't do or an essay or a nonfiction book. Where can the novel take us? Well, that was the challenge is how do you talk about something so big and amorphous and that's changing underneath your feet? And luckily, I think a novelist can bring it to you

can first of all not answer it. And I feel like an article sometimes feels they have to come up with a thesis about it. I have a sort of check writer show up at the beginning of the book and say, Americans never ask themselves, what if the whole idea is wrong? And we don't. We just keep saying, how can we fix this? But what if it was flawed from the beginning? And 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 my 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 Freddie, our narrator, whether they can hold together. I think that notion of how to persist without answers is so central.

to the book, both in the sense of, you know, the American experiment, but also, I mean, this is profoundly a book about middle age and, right, and about this relationship whose code word is uncertain and uncertainty, right? So how do you, how do you persist without scripts and without answers? And 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'm sure they exist elsewhere in novels, but I certainly haven't seen them enough. And that's conversations between different generations of gay men. And that to me, I was like, this is different, right? Because there's, you know, 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 a conscious aim? 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. And then I realized I had set up three different generations of gay men and 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 gaymen. And often what it is is that there's an envy at the freedom

that we fought for and that they take for granted, but 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. And sometimes in the Internet you see I'm referred to as a queer elder, which is an honor. But I just hadn't thought of myself that way yet, And I have to prepare for that.

That's where I'm going. And there is some respect, but then there's often a frustration. For instance, that in my generation, we often think of ourselves as not being people of privilege because we live through the AIDS pandemic and getting beat up and no one being out. And yet we have now, if we look at ourselves, we actually are creatures of privilege. And it is hard to make that shift, I think, a lot and see what we need to change inside. and also led other people into the rights that we have fought for in one and not just bring the ladder up and say like,

all right, we're going to Fire Island, that's it. I mean, when you started writing this character, Arthur, he was older than you, and you've gotten older and closer and age to him. Do you relate to him differently? I definitely do. I, although he clearly, even the way I'm dressed today, I look exactly like the cover art. Oh my God, you absolutely do.

Which I just did by accident. And this is absurd. And I don't... And 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... is more innocent than I and sweeter,

but also blind and clumsy and causing pain to other people. And that's a nice position to be in as a novelist because I have enough distance to deal with him as a different person. And I think I'd be more cruel to myself than I'm pretty cruel to him, I have to say. I put him in a hurricane.

Yeah, you're definitely, you put him through a lot, but it's not punishing. It's loving, it's indulgent. It's all of these things. But his haplessness and Freddie's voice are the real engines of this book for me. I don't know if you've been paying attention to the sort of churning conversations. I mean, 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. Right?

Yeah. And what is the role of the novelist? What is the role of the novel in telling these stories? What is the truthful account? Is it the account that is sort of unsparing and full of the pain? Or, you know, what does that leave out? Does that leave out stories of lightness and love and everything else? I mean, I'm wondering, like, are such concerns in the room with you when you sit down and write?

I think I'm abstractly aware of that, but that I know for certain that my project for myself is to try to think of traumatic things and of my story really and make them a funny story because not just because that would be fun but also to, it's only funny if you realize the person turned out okay. They're over it.

They've transformed it. And because for me, what's often left out of queer fiction or at least when I was a teenager in the, you know, it was like the 80s, and 90s, was what I found was that always the tool was a defiant sense of joy. You know, we were out on the streets protesting the war, but the signs would say, you know, fish nets, not fighter jets, U.S. 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. And so we'd win the media. And that was like a revolution in protests. It's always been a sort of a tactic, and I think a really successful one. not witty and cruel. I think that it could go that way. But I think just to say like, it doesn't matter. Life's full of joy anyway. And I always felt that. And I wanted that to be in the book. I mean, another tactic that's in the book is Arthur does think about and encounters all kinds of stories and stories of pain and stories of difficulties, especially as traveling.

But it's not explicitly political. You don't identify. You don't sort of, for example, I think I was reading this somewhere, like, we don't see like MAGA hats, you know, we don't see anything identified quite so literally and explicitly. Tell me about your decision to sort of not take that tack, which it could have been very easily, right, to go and lampoon certain people and make it very, you know, explicit. But you don't do that. Tell me, tell me about how you decided to handle this part of the story. Well, I think two things. One, I think that's well covered. There's plenty of that.

know, I think that the late-night shows do already an excellent job, and there's of lamponing something terrifying that's happening in the country. But 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. And so 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. And then there's books where I'm thinking, I hope this is, you could read this 10 years from now, and that it would be. still be relevant. And if I put something that's about right now, it will have changed already. I mean, just even writing the book, everything has changed under me. But I didn't have to change the book

because I didn't nail it down. 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? And then there's that conversation between Arthur and the wife of his lover. I after his lover has died, his ex-lover long ago, you know, and they're talking about the death of his, of the ex, and someone says, oh, you know, it's shocking. And Arthur goes, no, no, it's not shocking. I knew it was coming. I just didn't prepare myself properly, you know, and there's a sense of the way that you talk so much, I mean, you talk, but through Arthur, so many characters in this book, keep talking about attention, pay attention,

look at things, you know, don't become blasé to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, 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, no? That's exactly what I think. And it's what I tell my students, if you want to be an artist of some kind, or even just an ethical person, it means being vulnerable to the world. But it also means being open to a place where you didn't see beauty or, or, or, or, or variety or specificity of, I mean, I read every graffiti in every bathroom I go to

because it's just, I read the name of the air freshener because it's just, it makes it 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. And I just try to to think about that person. Arthur thinks a lot about, 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? And Arthur's feeling a little bit about what does it mean to be at midlife, his position in the world, and he thinks a great deal about success. I mean, and it's a wonderful send-up of what it means to think about success, what it means to be a writer. And I'm wondering how you think about success and how, whether or not you're defining it differently, you know, having written about Arthur, having had the incredible success of Les and now of this book, has it changed for you how you define what it means to be a writerly success?

The response I got to Les, first of all, no one expected me to win that Pulitzer Prize, and then no one expected that to be a bestseller in the way it was, and having had five books before that, I know what's normal. You know, I didn't come into it and be like, well, I'm a genius. I was like, the same writer I was for five points. And something different happened here that is definitely part chance. You know, that is chance. And so success can't be being lucky.

Like that doesn't make any sense. Success has to be, I mean, I guess 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. You know, I've seen it all. So if I'm defining success as the New York Times bestseller list, I'm setting myself up for a lot of problems.

But 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. and if you can do that, the other things are not as important to you. You're like, well, I did my job. You know, the world either does their job or they don't. Is this the end of the road for Arthur and you?

Or is there another installment? There's not immediately an installment. But I feel, I have such a, 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, at the moment. I can't imagine where he'd go now. And Antarctica? Doesn't sound like a fun novel. I don't think he has a lot of fun. I think he's...

That is true. It doesn't matter where he goes, I suppose. He takes Arthur with himself everywhere he goes. That's staff writer Paul Segal talking with Andrew Sean Greer, author of the novel Less, and its sequel, Less is Lost. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. Now we're going to wrap up the program with a little trip outdoors. The air is clear. It's just before dawn. And a writer named Ellen Bass, who's published a number of poems in The New Yorker,

is taking her daily walk along the ocean near her home in Santa Cruz, California. Cliff Drive is a strange intersection of nature and city. So we have on the one side the whole of the Pacific, we've got beautiful cypress trees, and on the other side we have just a regular road that people are driving up and down and houses right up against it. We've still got some rosy-fingered dawn and a beautiful, shining half moon. Oh, there's four seagulls

just flying right across here. There's a surfer in the water and the whole of the Pacific. I've been walking here almost every day for about 30 years. And every day is a different day. The ocean is really wild sometimes where it comes up over,

Westcliff Drive so you can be walking along and have the spray hit you. Today it's pretty calm with just real nice, slow, perfect rollers crashing in. Oh, that surfer almost just got one here. The cliff here changes so fast even in terms of erosion. It's mudstone which is layered and as storms come and as the ocean keeps pounding into it, even just in the 30 years that I've been here, I've seen enormous change. They've had to actually move where the road is further in, because where the road was is now in the ocean. And that's so thrilling, really, to be able to live in geologic time. And right now, the sun is just peeking up above the sky. Above the sun is just peeking up above the hills down toward Monterey. We see it just coming up over the ridge. I was thinking that most

people love or say they love variety and new things, and I think our culture does act like that. We always want something new and different and better. But my family and close friends tease me a lot about how much I love repetition and how much I love to just do the same over and over in a kind of mule-like way. And the first thing I thought about was this walk that I take every day on Westcliffe Drive, and so I wrote this poem Ode to Repetition. I like to take the same walk down the wide expanse of Woodrow to the ocean, and most days I turn left toward the lighthouse.

The sea is always different. different. Some days, dreamy, waves hardly waves, just a broad undulation in no hurry to arrive. Other days, the surfs drunk, crashing into the cliffs like a car wreck. And when I get home, I like the same dishes, stacked in the same cupboards, and then unstacked, and then stacked again. and the rhododendron spring after spring blossoming its pink ceremony. I could dwell in the kingdom of Coltrane, those rivers of breath through his horn, as he forms each phrase of lush life over and over until I die. Once I was afraid of this, opening the curtains every morning, only to close them again each night.

You could despair in the fixed town of your own life. But when I wake up to pee, I'm grateful the toilets in its usual place, the sink with its gift of water. I look out at the street, the halos of lampposts in the fog, where the moon rinsing the parked cars. When I get back in bed, I find the woman who's been sleeping there each night for 30 years. Only she's not the same.

Her body more naked in its aging, its disorder, though I still come to her like a beggar. One morning, one of us will rise bewildered without the other and open the curtains. There will be the same shaggy redwood in the neighbor's yard and the faultless stars going out one by one into the day.

Ellen Bass read her poem Ode to Repetition, which appears in the collection like a beggar. You can read more for work at New Yorker.com. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks so much.

See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by

Emily Boteen, Breda Green, Kalilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Putabuele. Along with Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.