In Defense of the Comic Novel: Andrew Sean Greer Talks “Less is Lost”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 October 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:12.9	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:16.9	Some of you may be familiar with a novelist called Arthur Less, a minor American novelist, to be precise.
0:23.6	He's the hero of Andrew Sean Greer's novel called Less.
0:28.0	He's a man whose biggest talent seems to be taking a problem and making it five times worse.
0:34.1	Less was a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, which is pretty rare for a book as funny as Les.
0:41.5	In Andrew Sean Greer's sequel, Less is Lost,
0:44.7	Arthur Less has now fallen on hard times,
0:46.8	and so he takes on a series of gigs to make ends meet,
0:49.9	which turns into a kind of road trip across the United States.
0:54.8	It was right after the 2016 presidential election,
0:58.1	and I just thought, oh, there's something I don't understand.
1:01.6	Let me go right into that,
1:03.9	because my family is from the South,
1:05.7	and I thought I don't understand where my family's from,
1:09.1	apparently.
1:09.6	The challenge was this time not how to write
1:12.1	joy on the page, but how to write about my country, honestly. That was what was constantly
1:19.6	in my mind. Andrew Sean Greer just talked with our staff writer, Parles Sagle.
1:26.4	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.
1:36.7	As if pleasure is this subversive feeling that we've forgotten we can get this from literary fiction.
1:43.6	But I, you know, as I was
	...

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