The tenderness with which he criticized and praised his character was contagious. Greer – as The New Yorker put it – used a similar trick as his protagonist, obtaining an overwhelming result. In the end, after traveling through several countries and broadening his views a bit, Less decides to turn that same tragedy into a farce. At the beginning of the book, Less is finishing a sad novel about the tragedy of being a gay man who grows up without guidance, since his elders died in the AIDS epidemic. This contradiction allowed Greer to frame – in the first installment – the figure of the white gay man in an innovative way as the most privileged of the rainbow flag. At the same time, he doesn’t seem to realize how lucky he is. Clueless and a victimizer (“the first homosexual in history to grow old,” the mysterious narrator explains to the reader), Less is a bit of a Buster Keaton, in that he is never aware of the danger that surrounds him. Less is Lost continues the adventures of Arthur Less – a gay novelist in his 50s who walks a fine line between feeling recognized and completely forgotten. “And I thought, well, if you win a Pulitzer Prize, doesn’t it mean you can write anything you want? So I thought, screw it, I’ll do what I want, even though my agent will be mad at me.” What he really wanted, he finally admitted, was to return to Less – his previous novel and his fifth overall – which is a lyrical, pessimistic, exhilarating work, about writing, growing old and being a gay man. It was a story about a road trip across the United States.Īfter reading it, he issued a judgment – one that carried a lot of weight, considering that he was, by then, an award-winning writer: “This is terrible.” At about 150-pages-long, it was what he had worked on after winning the Pulitzer. One afternoon in 2019, Sean Greer – who was born in Washington, D.C., in 1970 – sat down to look over a manuscript. Now, to be fair, Greer’s literary agent denies that she was opposed to continuing that bestselling novel (“but she said it!” the writer insists). Now, he’s released the sequel he was warned he shouldn’t write: Less is Lost. It’s not cool,’” recalls Andrew Sean Greer, whose novel Less won the award back in 2017. You cannot write a sequel to a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. “When I won the Pulitzer Prize, my agent said, ‘don’t write a sequel.
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