Quick Take
- Narration: Robert Petkoff is an excellent choice for Greer’s prose, his delivery captures the comedic timing and the wistful melancholy underneath it without overplaying either register.
- Themes: Middle age and the fear of becoming invisible, the comedy of minor catastrophe, first love as an unresolved question
- Mood: Funny and melancholy in equal measure, warmth that conceals genuine sadness
- Verdict: Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer Prize winner earns both the award and the praise, a comedy about aging and love that actually does what literary comedy rarely manages: make you laugh and then feel the loss.
Our Take on Less
I finished Less on a long train journey, which turned out to be exactly the right context for it. Arthur Less travels to avoid his feelings, and reading about his misadventures, almost falling in love in Paris, almost falling to his death in Berlin, booking himself by accident into a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India when he thought he was getting a writer’s residency, has the quality of watching someone outrun something that is inevitably still there when he stops. The train felt appropriate. There is something about motion that makes Less make more sense.
Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel in 2018, and the reaction to that news was divided in the literary world in the way that prizes for comedic novels usually are. The assumption that a funny book cannot also be a serious book is one that Less directly argues against, and argues against by example. This is not a novel that earns its comedy by softening the real things it is about: the particular terror of turning fifty, the way a first love never quite leaves you regardless of how many years stand between you and it, the professional humiliation of being a novelist who is famous for exactly the wrong reasons at exactly the wrong time in his career.
Why Listen to Less
The device Greer uses, Arthur Less accepting a series of half-baked literary invitations to every corner of the world to avoid attending the wedding of his ex-boyfriend of nine years, is perfect because it is transparently a flight from feeling that fools nobody, not Arthur, not the reader, not Freddy whose wedding is the thing being avoided. Greer extracts enormous comedy from Arthur’s earnest willingness to humiliate himself in the name of not quite facing the thing he is not facing. The misadventures are funny in the way that genuine awkwardness is funny: specific and mortifying and entirely believable.
The prose is one of the persistent pleasures of the book. Greer writes sentences with the controlled beauty of a stylist who knows exactly what he is doing and trusts the reader to notice. Reviewers have consistently noted the arresting lyricism the New York Times review described, it is accurate. But the lyricism is never decorative; it is always in service of the comedy or the emotion, sometimes both simultaneously. The passage about Arthur almost falling in love in Paris has a quality that stays with you precisely because it is so economical about what it names and what it leaves unnamed. Less is a novel that uses restraint as its primary tool.
The secondary characters and the specific absurdity of each literary event Arthur attends function as a portrait of the international literary world that is acidly accurate and entirely affectionate at once. The writer-in-residence at the Christian Retreat Center section in particular has a quality of pure comic setpiece that remains entirely consistent with the novel’s emotional register. Greer is funny without ever undercutting the thing the comedy is protecting, which is the more difficult achievement.
What to Watch For in Less
The narrative structure, a third-person narrator whose specific relationship to Arthur is revealed only gradually, is one of the novel’s most elegant choices and also one that requires some patience before it fully reveals itself. The Booktrack edition listed here adds a musical soundtrack to the audiobook, which is an unusual format. The music plays in the background rather than replacing anything in the narration. Listeners who prefer traditional audiobook format without background music should be aware of this distinction when selecting the edition, the standard version is available separately.
This is a book whose ending is better than it first appears. Greer has been building toward a revelation about the narrator’s identity and the nature of the love story that underpins Arthur’s entire misadventure, and when it lands it recontextualizes what you have heard in ways that send you back through the best passages. The comedy you enjoyed the first time through has a slightly different quality once you understand who has been telling you about Arthur Less and why. The second listen, or the second read, is rewarding in ways the first cannot be.
Robert Petkoff’s narration is one of the book’s consistent pleasures. He has a quality in his delivery of Arthur that is slightly bewildered and genuinely well-meaning, which is exactly what the character requires. The comedy depends on Arthur being sympathetically confused rather than buffoonish, and Petkoff maintains that distinction across the full eight hours. The more emotionally open passages, the first love sections that return in Arthur’s memory at various points, benefit from a narrator who can shift registers without making the transition feel abrupt or tonally mismatched.
Who Should Run Away from Their Feelings with This Book
Less rewards readers who are willing to trust a comic novel with something real, listeners who can hold laughter and genuine feeling simultaneously rather than needing them segregated into different emotional registers. It is particularly resonant for anyone who has turned fifty or is watching that threshold approach, anyone who has a first love that has not entirely resolved itself, and anyone who has ever tried to outrun an emotion through logistics. The Pulitzer Prize is not the reason to read it, but the book is worth it on its own terms regardless of the award.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Booktrack edition that this audiobook listing refers to, is the music intrusive?
The Booktrack format adds a musical soundtrack that plays underneath the narration rather than replacing it. Opinions divide on whether the music enhances or distracts. The narration itself is unchanged from the standard edition. Listeners who want a pure audiobook experience without background music should look for the standard version of Less.
The narrative structure involves a gradual reveal about who is narrating, does this work in audiobook format or does it work better in print?
It works well in both formats, possibly better in audio because Petkoff’s consistent narrative voice makes the reveal land with a particular quality when you understand in retrospect who has been speaking. The recontextualization of earlier passages is satisfying regardless of format.
Is Less as funny as its reputation suggests, or does the comedy feel forced for a Pulitzer Prize winner?
The comedy is genuine and sustained rather than manufactured to justify the literary credentials. Reviewers with widely different reading backgrounds consistently note that the book made them laugh, which is not a common response to literary fiction. The prize-winning quality and the comedy are not in tension, they emerge from the same source.
Does Less work as a standalone novel or does the sequel, Less Is Lost, need to be read to complete the story?
Less is complete as a standalone. It has a full emotional arc and a resolved ending that does not require the sequel. Less Is Lost continues Arthur’s story with new misadventures but was published separately in 2022, long after Less won the Pulitzer. Starting here and deciding whether to continue is entirely reasonable.
