Jargogled Impressions.

Lately, I have had a hard time justifying to people around me why I read fiction and why everyone should. With everything that’s happening in the world around us, and with the constant attention on professional success, the time investment required to read good fiction is shrinking like a plastic near fire. For me, fiction has always held a special place in my time wallet owing to its ability to transport me to places strangely unfamiliar, to people both strange and oddly familiar, to stories that entice and intoxicate, and to situations that range from hilarious to tragic.

Less does that to an extent. It’s a small, digestible take on the fragility of one Arthur Less who does his Lessian things and carries on with the drift of his life like a petal in a gushing wind.

“From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad.”

The book’s opening is benign, and yet oddly engaging. What’s the story of Arthur? And why should is this presumption of it being bad? We learn soon enough of his station in life – an under-confident author of books that have done average on all footings, and surely is reflective of his status as a writer. We find pockets of fans in the various places Arthur finds himself to be – some misconstrued, others misrepresented. And yet, there is an odd reality to how Arthur perceives himself and his story to be. The book, as we soon learn to know, is this weird balance between the writer and its major protagonist who happens to be writer himself.

The premise of the story is familiar enough. An ex-boyfriend getting married, with issues unresolved, makes the hero of the story embark on a funny and hilarious misadventure across the globe. To places in corners of the world where Less seems not to forget or forgive his deeds or misdeeds. A candid rebuke of the ways of his life isn’t offered to what seems like a rather unobserved way of leading one’s life. Expecting that from an author nonetheless is concerning.

“Strange to be almost fifty, no? I feel like I just understood how to be young.”
“Yes! It’s like the last day in a foreign country. You finally figure out where to get coffee, and drinks, and a good steak. And then you have to leave. And you won’t ever be back.”

It’s a mixture of a writer coming to terms with his rapidly aging life and his rapidly devolving love life. And so much of this realization is festered with an innate sense of imbalance between what he thinks he’s capable of versus what he is. And this is where the identification I find appealing in fiction books comes out the starkest, at least for me.

“Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material.”

This asymmetry between his perception and reality is brought to fore in so many places – getting into a car because he believes the driver got his name wrong, believing he can speak German, thinking of himself as a fit person and bringing athletic bands everywhere he goes. It’s these small mishaps and foibles that bring out the comedy in the book and you tend to sympathize with the subject.

“How can so many things become a bore by middle age — philosophy, radicalism, and other fast foods
— but heartbreak keeps its sting?”

Less’s identity as a gay writer sticks out in several sporadic incidents. This identity, as a writer, or rather as a ‘gay writer’ isn’t something he is entirely familiar with. When reminded that he isn’t a bad writer per say, but maybe a bad ‘gay writer’, its revealing to understand the thoughts that cross his mind. A somewhat Freudian malady. Its self-denial mixed with self-deprecation mixed with self-identification that makes up for almost all of Less’s attitude towards life in general.

The ending isn’t as much a surprise as it’s a rounded closing. The travails of one Arthur less, as he travels around the world to forget about his paramour, is wrought with frigid emotions and pent up feelings that refuse to come out of this thin, lanky, dreamy, and often lost poor soul.

Fiction has its role in this life. It’s that feeling of trudging through someone’s life crafted from someone’s unusual bent of mind, to find the pickles of existence that one can sit back and understand and revel in its familiarity. Less is, in the author’s own words, a book about ‘joy’. A joy it is to read it.

“Just for the record: happiness is not bullshit.”