Finished: Less (Greer) This year's Pulitzer Prize winner about a 49 year old gay man, Arthur Less, a fair to middlin' author who, heartbroken that his former lover of nine years is marrying someone else, decides to travel the world by accepting all kinds of invitations he's been offered...all but the one he can't bear to attend...his ex-lover, Freddy's wedding! I kept putting off reading this book, but am so glad I finally read it. We travel with Arthur as he goes on all these adventures, where, because it's Arthur Less, something almost always goes wrong! He's running from  his feelings, and from his publisher's rejection of his latest book, and in the process, he reminisces about his first love, Robert, all the loves in between, and his last love, the man he's still in love with, Freddy. There are so many passages in this book that I actually laughed out loud at that I was shocked. It's been a long time since a book has made me do that. And, so many passages I related to as well. Arthur is going to turn fifty while he's away on his trip, and his focus on that also brings out all kinds of self-examination. So, almost anything that could go wrong, does go wrong. Arthur is headed from San Francisco to New York to moderate a panel discussion on popular SciFi author H.H.H Mandern's recent book for his first stop. He comes to realize that they had to go pretty far down on a list of people they would want to moderate before he said yes. He never gets to moderate the panel, because H.H.H. Mandern comes down with food poisoning. Arthur next heads off to Mexico where he was invited to be part of an author's symposium, but it turns out that only he and the ex-wife of his first love, Robert, are to be on that panel. This being the wife who was scorned when Robert left her for Arthur!! As it turns out, she can't show up because she's broken her hip, so Arthur is left there on his own, battling the English/Spanish language barrier. Arthur's travels continue on in this manner, from Berlin, where he thinks he's speaking perfect German when he's up for an award, but where the reader sees what he's actually saying. It is pretty funny! And, then he goes on to Paris where he almost falls in love after his plane out of Paris is delayed and he attends a party of an old friend who never shows up. From Paris he goes to Morocco, where after riding a camel through the desert and nearly being smothered by a sandstorm, he winds up a ski chalet. On to Japan where he has agreed to offer his critique on authentic Japanese food to a magazine, even though he has never eaten Japanese food. And finally, to his last destination, a retreat in India where he is determined to rewrite his rejected book. All his travel experiences, his longing thoughts about Freddy, and his reminiscing about Robert do lend him a new insight on how the protagonist of his book should be changed. He has the entire book written at the retreat but the last chapter when he gets a call from home that Robert, who is now 70 years old to Arthur's 50 (he had his birthday on the Sahara), has had a stroke. Arthur decides to head home the next day since he remains good friends with Robert. Luckily, nothing goes wrong with his flights home, and as he wearily climbs the steps to his home, he sees that a light is on and someone is waiting for him. It's Freddy!!! It turns out, Freddy was married for one day and as he sobbed on the first day of his honeymoon in Tahiti, his husband told him that he needed to do what made him happy. It was clear that Freddy truly still loved Arthur. And, it turns out that Freddy was the narrator of the book all along. This is where the book ends, and for once, there seems to be a happy ending for Arthur Less! An uplifting ending, and a good book along the way. :-) Here are a couple of passages that I either related to or that made me laugh.

On Arthur playing baseball as a youngster, which he really had no interest in, but he played anyway. I just loved this:

His father had to remind his son's coach (who had recommended Less's removal) that it was a public athletic league and, like a public library, was open to all. Even the fumbling oafs among us. And his mother, a softball champ in her day, has had to pretend none of this matters to her at all and drives Less to games with a speech about sportsmanship that is more a dismantling of her own believes than a relief to the boy. Picture Less with his leather glove weighing down his left hand, sweating in the spring heat,  his mind lost in the reverie of his childhood lunacies--when an object appears in the sky. Acting almost on a species memory, he runs forward, the glove before him. The bright sun spangles his vision. And--thwack!! The crowd is screaming. He looks into the glove and sees, gloriously grass-bruised and double-stitched in red, the single catch of his life span.

On Arthur describing the tent he was set up in in the Sahara and the sounds surrounding him in the desert:

From the north: a camel bellowing to spite the dusk.
From the south: Lewis screaming that there is a scorpion in his bed.
From the west: the tinkle of flatware as the Bedouin set their dinner table.
From the south again: Lewis shouting not to worry, it was just a paper clip.
From the east: The British technology-whiz-cum-nightclub-owner saying: "Guys? I don't feel so great." 

omg, I just laughed out loud at Lewis, a friend of Arthur's who met him in Morocco for this part of the trip, lol.

And, on the description of a restaurant that Arthur goes to in Japan:

The restaurant sits on a rock above the river and is very old and water stained in way that would delight a painter and trouble a contractor....