Less sounds like a book I would love: a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about an aging white guy traveling the world in an effort to forestall regrets. The fact that Greer has already published a sequel (Less is Lost) confirms that he intends Arthur Less to be a continuing character like Updike's Rabbit Angstrom or Ford's Frank Bascombe.
The fundamental shortcoming of Less is that Greer fails to make Arthur Less a distinctive or compelling character. He is generic and I was unable to invest in his adventures. The same is true of Arthur's round-the-world travels –– the descriptions of Mexico and Europe and India and Japan are clichéd and don't build toward any epiphany. It's what Evelyn would call a grandpa story: this happened, then that happened, and so what.
What did the Pulitzer folks see that I did not?
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