Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

Less, by Andrew Sean Greer

Winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Less is a rarity for that honor: a comic novel. Generally award committees gravitate to heavy fare: violence, misery, catastrophe. So it’s refreshing to discover that a tale both funny and very well written has sneaked into the select company of that short list, going so far as to win.

Not to give away too much: our hero, Arthur Less, is a gay writer on the brink of turning 50. His younger boyfriend of nine years has just left him. Less and his older longtime paramour, a noted poet, still love each other, but after twenty years together stopped sharing living quarters. And now Freddy is gone – ready to marry someone else. Knowing he will be invited to the wedding, and not wanting to provoke anyone by either refusing to attend or attending, Less accepts every speaking or teaching engagement that’s recently been offered to him. He doesn’t have to worry about the heartbreaking event, because he’ll be in New York, Mexico, then Italy, Germany, Paris, Rome, Morocco, India, Tokyo – by the time he gets back to San Francisco he’ll be fifty and Freddy will be married.

Less has published a few midlist novels, but was stung in a review as a “magniloquent spoony.” Meeting with his agent on the New York leg of his jaunt, he learns that his publisher is dropping him. He’s not PC enough. “I’m a bad gay?” he asks, incredulous. Apparently they are after less traditional endings than the one he supplied, so he is Out. He hopes to undertake a rewrite of the rejected novel on this hejira – a month in India at the retreat should do it. But this news is a tough start to his trip.

Arthur Less is a naif, even at his age, and people love him for this quality of startled sincerity. His share of misunderstandings, struggles with modern travel – airports, hotels, language barriers, luggage – are all dealt humorously: nothing catastrophic, but he’s forever making embarrassing mistakes. In short, he is Everyman, losing his dignity and bumping into people he’d rather forget. Interwoven with his awkward moments are memories – of his life with the Great Poet, the unexpected nine years with Freddy, the impression he makes on those around him. Here’s a taste:

“Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world. Strange though; because he is afraid of everything, nothing is harder than anything else. Taking a trip around the world is no more terrifying than buying a stick of gum. The daily dose of courage.”

Not only is this book delightfully witty, it is also a good story, with poignancy and a satisfying ending. The Pulitzer Committee was right – it’s a winner, and you should read it!

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt's lovely fluid prose in her 770-page Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Goldfinch carried me through the convenient events and deus ex machina ending that would have dammed up a lesser book. I read it in a week because I had to know what happened next, whether our young narrator was learning from his mistakes or merely being more clever about concealing them. And I had to know what would happen to the exquisite small painting, The Goldfinch of the title.

Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker and his art-history-passionate mother are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when a bomb goes off. Separated from his mother in the chaos, Theo assists a fatally-wounded man who gives him his signet ring, tells him to seek out his partner, and also urges him to take the painting The Goldfinch, otherwise likely to be damaged in the collapsing gallery. Slipping past the firemen, Theo flees the museum with the ring in his pocket and the painting in a bag. Soon he learns his mother was killed in the blast. The ring connects him to an antiques restorer on the Lower East Side, and in the company of this kindly man, the appreciation for beauty Theo's mother planted in him takes root.

His estranged father shows up, girlfriend in tow, and they bring him to her house in a nearly deserted exurb of Las Vegas, where he is left to his own devices. In the local school he meets Boris, a Ukrainian youth whose father is an engineer, in the field weeks at a time. With virtually no supervision, this pair do what you might expect from teenage boys: they drink, they use whatever drugs come their way, they steal from the local market, they fight and remain friends. Boris is fearless, whether in accepting beatings from his drunken father or in shoplifting groceries so he and Theo won't starve, and he persuades his less-worldly friend that his own father is a kinder man and better parent than he gives him credit for.

Avoiding spoilers, I'll stop there with the plot, except to say that there's a hiatus of some years in which Theo grows up and finds his niche in the world - and remains in thrall to this non-negotiable treasure, the painting.

Tartt makes some fine observations about the transitory nature of human life and the longer span of art:  
"I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past."
"It's there in the light-rinsed atmosphere, the brush strokes he permits us to see, up close, for exactly what they are - hand worked flashes of pigment, the very passage of the bristles visible - and then, at a distance, the miracle... the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone."

And with a painting as inspiration, Tartt has made her own work of art.