book reviews of less

By Andrew Sean Greer

'Less' by Andrew Sean Greer is an award-winning novel that has readers' reviews on every end of the spectrum. Find out the pros and cons of this modern satire in this review.

About the Book

Article written by Onyekachi Osuji

B.A. in Public Administration and certified in Creative Writing (Fiction and Non-Fiction)

‘ Less ‘ by Andrew Sean Greer sparked controversies and mixed reactions when it won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Some reviewers were harsh in their conclusion that the book won the prestigious prize because of white male privilege, while other reviews believed that it was a well-deserved win because of the poetic flow of its narration.

But controversies aside, this article will be my personal opinion about the book, which I intend to be as objective as possible.

If there is one thing that makes ‘ Less ‘ by Andrew Sean Greer deserving of the Pulitzer Prize it won, it is the style. The novel is so lyrical. Literary devices flow so seamlessly that one may be deceived into thinking it was an effortless piece of writing.

‘ Less ‘ by Andrew Sean Greer is prose that reads beautifully like a poem and conjures dramatic scenes in a reader’s mind. There is no gainsaying the creativity showcased in the novel. It easily rates five out of five stars for me.

The plot is a lighthearted plot that should make one laugh all through. But I would not give full marks when it comes to the plot because of the way the writer tries to make trivial issues appear so serious, as if urging readers to feel sorry for the protagonist.

So, a lover you’ve been with is getting married to someone else? Yes, we understand that that hurts. But come on! Why are you making it look like a tragic natural disaster for the protagonist when he agreed with his lover that it was just casual sex all the while? And hey, Arthur Less, do you realize that you’re actually among the elite few? I mean, how many other heartbroken people get to hop on a plane and enjoy all-expense paid trips to several choice destinations around the world? As the character Zohra says, it’s hard to feel sorry for such a guy.

Structure of the Novel

The structure of ‘ Less ‘ is one of the things I love about the novel. First of all, it is not so voluminous, barely two hundred pages long, and can be read in a few hours. The length of a novel is one of the things that encourages people to pick it up to read, especially lazy readers or busy readers.

Another thing I love about the novel is the play on words in the title of each chapter. The novel has eight chapters, and each chapter’s title is derived from the protagonist’s name Arthur Less. So the first chapter is titled ”Less At First,” the last chapter is ”Less at Last,” and the chapters in between are titled Less with the derivative noun of the country Arthur Less is visiting at the time. For instance, “Less Mexican,” “Less German,” “Less Moroccan,” “Less Indian,” etc.

Apart from the protagonist, Arthur Less, the characters in this novel are not well developed. The author leaves a lot to be desired in his portrayal of the characters in ‘ Less .’ For instance, the character Robert is one with an interesting story of sexuality in ‘ Less .’ It would have made for a better read if he gave some details about how Robert got to be in a passionate heterosexual marriage at first and then come out as gay.

There are many scenes in the novel that are hilarious and will have readers laughing hard. The author’s ability to place the protagonist in awkward situations is an enjoyable read.

The only thing that prevents this novel from getting full marks for humor from every reader is that the humorous scenes are sometimes not depicted with clarity.

Unrealized Potentials

The most disappointing thing about ‘ Less ‘ by Andrew Sean Greer is that it takes readers to various countries around the world but ends up teaching readers so little about all those destinations. It did not showcase the exotic tourist attractions nor the educative everyday lives of people in these places.

A novel set in five continents, nine countries, and scores of cities ended up being so bland in terms of travel enlightenment. Talk about unrealized potential!

Review of Less

Book Title: Less

Book Description: 'Less' by Andrew Sean Greer combines lyrical prose and endearing humor in a critically acclaimed narrative.

Book Author: Andrew Sean Greer

Book Edition: First Edition

Book Format: Hardcover

Publisher - Organization: Little, Brown and Company

Date published: July 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-316-39413-9

Number Of Pages: 290

Less by Andrew Sean Greer Review: A Poetic Prose with Drama

The novel  Less  by Andrew Sean Greer is so wonderfully crafted. It won prestigious awards amidst mixed reactions and reviews. One of the best qualities of the novel is the writing style—it is lyrical, poetic, and enjoyable, and the humor is endearing too.  But on the flip side, one thing that detracts from the novel is the forced sadness and gloominess over trivial issues, whilst the protagonist and the narrator become annoying at many points in the novel.

• Poetic Narration
• Inspirational Dialogues
• Endearing Protagonist
• Poorly-Explored Settings
• Undeveloped Characters

About Onyekachi Osuji

Onyekachi was already an adult when she discovered the rich artistry in the storytelling craft of her people—the native Igbo tribe of Africa. This connection to her roots has inspired her to become a Literature enthusiast with an interest in the stories of Igbo origin and books from writers of diverse backgrounds. She writes stories of her own and works on Literary Analysis in various genres.

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Booklover Book Reviews

Less (a Novel) by Andrew Sean Greer: Uncommon narrative

Less (a Novel) by Andrew Sean Greer is a life-affirming story about the writing life that I highly recommend to those with strong literary leanings. Read my review.

Less Book Synopsis

WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T RUN AWAY FROM YOUR PROBLEMS?

Arthur Less is a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the post from an ex-boyfriend of nine years who is engaged to someone else. Arthur can’t say yes – it would be too awkward; he can’t say no – it would look like defeat. So, he begins to accept the invitations on his desk to half-baked literary events around the world.

From France to India, Germany to Japan, Arthur almost falls in love, almost falls to his death, and puts miles between him and the plight he refuses to face. Less is a novel about mishaps, misunderstandings and the depths of the human heart.

( Hachette Australia )

Genre:  Literature, Drama, Humour, Romance, Adventure

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BOOK REVIEW

Less…. don’t you just love the brevity yet gravitas of Andrew Sean Greer’s title.

Literary awards are rarely sufficient motivation for me to choose one book over another. The enjoyment of literature is notoriously subjective. But since this was already on my wishlist, its recent Pulitzer Prize firmed up my decision to purchase.

What immediately struck me about Less (a Novel) was its unusual narrative structure; predominantly first-person present tense (identity undisclosed) yet omnipresent.

From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Look at him: seated primly on the hotel lobby’s plush sofa, blue suit and white shirt, legs knee-crossed so that one polished loafer hangs free of its heel. The pose of a young man.

But on occasion more like third-person. It is both confounding and intriguing.

It is clear this narrator is a person in Arthur’s life (and thus a character mentioned within the novel), but it is not plausible this person is observing him in the present tense. The only way it works is if that narrator, at some later point having heard of Arthur’s travel tales, is imagining observing him in those situations. It took a little while for me to get my head around this; to stop fighting it.

The quirky wins

Eventually, the quirkiness and lyricism of the narrator’s observations and their ironic and conversational tone won me over.

Once in his twenties, a poet he had been talking with extinguished her cigarette in a potted plant and said, “You’re like a person without skin.” A poet had said this. One who made her living flaying herself alive in public had said the he , tall and young and hopeful Arthur Less, was  without skin . But it was true.

I found myself highlighting countless passages, admiring the subtle yet potent irony woven into this narrative’s fabric.

There are always a few drops left in the bottle of indignity.

Ron Charles of The Washington Post called Less   ‘the funniest novel of the year’ .

With regards to its subject matter, this novel is effectively preaching to the converted. Less is about writers, writing and the broader challenges of a career and life involving creative personas. Literary references abound.

“He kisses—how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can use only the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.

While Arthur’s rudderlessness limits the extent one invests in his plight, his eclectic travel experiences and the intrigue surrounding the narrator’s identity make for compelling reading. Recent events have also injected an additional, delightful stroke of serendipity to this tale.

But it is the more serious emotional and philosophical depths plumbed by Greer’s narrator, combined with his lead character’s absence of expectation, that ultimately make this novel life-affirming.

Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is a title I highly recommend, but only to those with strong literary leanings.

BOOK RATING:  The Story 4 / 5 ; The Writing 4.5 / 5  — Overall 4.25

Get your copy of Less from:

Bookshop US Amazon Booktopia AU

Will there be a Less book sequel?

Yes, a sequel has been published, titled Less is Lost .

If you like the sound of Less , you may also enjoy: Hotel Silence by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir  /  The Street Sweeper by Elliot Perlman  /   A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman  /   A Theatre for Dreamers by Polly Samson  /  Spaceman of Bohemia by Jaroslav Kalfar

About the Auther, Andrew Sean Greer

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of five works of fiction, including The Confessions of Max Tivoli , which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He won the California Book Award, New York Public Library Young Lions Award and O Henry Award for short fiction. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. Greer lives in San Francisco. He has travelled to all of the locations in this novel, but he is only big in Italy.

Check out Andrew Sean Greer’s website and connect with him on Twitter .

Related reading:

• Finally, a comic novel gets a Pulitzer Prize. It’s about time – Washington Post
• Pulitzer Prize Winner Andrew Sean Greer Shares How He Wrote an Award-Winning Novel – Esquire

Other Less reviews

“This is a very funny and occasionally wise book.” –  Kirkus Reviews

“Greer mercilessly skewers the insecurity of authors as well as the vanity of the literary industry’s self-absorption in the face of its irrelevance to most people’s lives. The stealthy genius of this novel is that it simultaneously tells the life story of a basically sweet man whom the industry has eaten alive… Novels about novelists are always a risk, but Less is about anyone who has allowed their calling to define them at the expense of their humanity.” –  The Guardian

“Arthur’s wanderings as he makes his way from disaster to disaster are hilariously, brilliantly harrowing. But laughter is only a part of the joy of reading this book. Greer writes sentences of arresting lyricism and beauty.” – NYTimes

“While the book is intended to be funny, at times it feels like a middle-aged man’s  A Series of Unfortunate Events .” – KenyonReview

“A charming novel about a middle-aged odyssey taken by the most amiable of heroes” – The Independent

” Wise, generous of spirit and beautifully written… Arthur Less may be in the throes of a midlife crisis, but his heart-warming adventures leave one longing for more. ” – The Spectator

The Pulitzer judges and I do not always agree though…. For example, see my review of the much-lauded Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout .

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Reviews of Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

by Andrew Sean Greer

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Literary Fiction
• Contemporary
• Humor & Satire
• Mid-Life Onwards

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About this Book

• Reading Guide

Book Summary

A breakout romantic comedy by the bestselling author of five critically acclaimed novels.

Who says you can't run away from your problems? You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes - it would be too awkward - and you can't say no - it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world. QUESTION : How do you arrange to skip town? ANSWER: You accept them all. What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last. Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, Less is, above all, a love story. A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," Less shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.

Excerpt Less

From where I sit, the story of Arthur Less is not so bad. Look at him: seated primly on the hotel lobby's plush round sofa, blue suit and white shirt, legs knee-crossed so that one polished loafer hangs free of its heel. The pose of a young man. His slim shadow is, in fact, still that of his younger self, but at nearly fifty he is like those bronze statues in public parks that, despite one lucky knee rubbed raw by schoolchildren, discolor beautifully until they match the trees. So has Arthur Less, once pink and gold with youth, faded like the sofa he sits on, tapping one finger on his knee and staring at the grandfather clock. The long patrician nose perennially burned by the sun (even in cloudy New York October). The washed-out blond hair too long on the top, too short on the sides—portrait of his grandfather. Those same watery blue eyes. Listen: you might hear anxiety ticking, ticking, ticking away as he stares at that clock, which unfortunately is not ticking ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• Have you ever had days, weeks, years, like what Arthur Less is feeling — times when nothing, absolutely nothing, seems to be going your way? What's your solution?
• Everyone points to the books laugh-out-loud humor. What do you find particularly funny — dialogue, Arthur's haplessness and pratfalls, random observations, the entire tone of the book?
• How would you describe Arthur? Are you sympathetic to him, or is he primarily a self-pitying guy in midlife crisis? Does he exhibit any humanity or is he too self-indulgent to connect with others? Or do you find yourself falling and rooting for him? Does your attitude toward him change during the course of the novel?
• Talk about the writing seminar Arthur gives in Berlin —...
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Pulitzer Prize Winners 2018

Media Reviews

Reader reviews, bookbrowse review.

Less is also a love story with many bittersweet moments. Thoughts of Freddy's marriage haunt Arthur, even as he takes a lover in Berlin and comes up with a plan to re-write his new novel, after his publisher rejects it. As he completes his global journey and comes to terms with "the tragi-comic business of being alive" this story wraps up with a warm-hearted and fitting conclusion. Overall, this is a charming tale, very well told... continued

Full Review (594 words) This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today .

(Reviewed by Kate Braithwaite ).

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Beyond the Book

My favorite gay characters in literature.

With his portrait of Arthur Less, a lovable — if somewhat hapless — man on a trip round the world, Andrew Sean Greer gives more than a nod to Mark Twain's 1869 satire, The Innocents Abroad . Less, a middle-aged gay man, needs to radically re-write his own novel about "a middle-aged gay man walking about San Francisco." This self-conscious reflection on the concept of a gay character prompted me to recall some of the diverse LGBT characters I have known and loved over the years. Stephen Gordon is the hero of Radclyffe Hall's classic, The Well of Loneliness (1928). This story of an upper class girl who realizes from an early age that she is attracted to women was banned in Britain after an obscenity trial. Stephen, given a boy'...

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• Genres & Themes

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Review: Less by Andrew Sean Greer

Less  by Andrew Sean Greer is an absolute delight. One of my favorite books of this year. It’s a must-read!

Sometimes you just know you’re going to love a book. Whether it’s a good vibe, positive critical buzz, what have you, it can be love at first sight. And  Less  even surpassed my expectations. There’s so much to love with Less  from its comedic nature, impressive writing and in the end, a story full of heart.

The story is about Arthur Less, he’s about to turn 50 and his ex-boyfriend is now engaged to someone else. While he’s published several books, none of them have caught on like he expected. Still, he receives a series of half-baked literary invitations from around the world and this becomes his perfect excuse for not attending his ex’s wedding. And thus, begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the problems he refuses to face.  What could possibly go wrong? For more on the synopsis, click here .

This book also is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, which is such an impressive feat for the author! And I believe it’s so well-deserved for many reasons. Let’s take a closer look at Less .

Unique narrative style

Less is written from the viewpoint of a narrator. While at first, it seems the narrator is just a third-party teller of Less’ story that we see in so many other novels, as the book goes on, it becomes apparent the narrator knows Less in some type of fashion. However, the identity is kept a mystery until the final pages.

The prose is comedic, I literally laughed out loud at certain passages. The narrative switches from satire to poignant observations at different times in the story. For instance, Less is about to turn 50 but in many ways still acts much younger. When talking about youth with his friend:

[blockquote align=”none” author=””]“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.” [/blockquote]

Also, since the book travels to so many countries, there’s lots of colorful descriptions of each country. The countries receive their own chapters with plenty of content. Due to the writer traveling the world aspect, Less is compared to  Eat, Pray, Love but it’s a very different book. Still, though, if you enjoyed the travel in Eat, Pray Love , you’ll really like it in Less .

Keep in mind, while there is plenty of idyllic settings, much goes wrong with Less’ travels, which makes it all the more endearing.

Past relationships

As we get to know Less more, we learn he’s had two significant romantic relationships in his life. The first in his youth, with the much older Robert, a brilliant and award-winning poet. Their relationship was affection but riddled with complications, not least of all the age difference:

[blockquote align=”none” author=””]”When you’re fifty, I’ll be seventy-five. And then what will we do? Nothing to do but laugh about it. True for everything.” [/blockquote]

While he traveled and experienced so much with Robert, he also learned the drawbacks of living with a “genius.” For Arthur, it was like living alone where everything was sacrificed for Robert’s work. Still, even though it ended, Robert will always remain Less’ first love. And for a while, he thought his only love.

Then came along Freddy, the son of Arthur’s nemesis (which is an entertaining section). Arthur is about 15 years older than Freddy, the kind and handsome teacher. He believed it wasn’t love. Or was it? Because when Freddy said he met someone else, Arthur didn’t fight for him, which slowly becomes one of his biggest regrets.

This story takes you on a journey along with analyzing love, aging and last chance. Add it to your reading list immediately!

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How “Less Is Lost” Finds Its Footing

By Alexandra Schwartz

Pity the plight of the gay white man. Not as notorious as his heterosexual counterpart, more socially privileged than his queer peers, he has been drained of popular sympathy by virtue of his cultural success. Take the recent film “Fire Island,” Joel Kim Booster’s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice”: while the Bennet sisters are transformed into a gaggle of gay friends of color (mostly), the role of the villainous Mr. Wickham is given to Dex, a white seducer who deploys his Tom of Finland physique and sterling Instagram politics to prey upon his dazzled prospects. But a gay white guy as a marginalized hero, an underdog whose private tragedies we mourn? That’s a harder sell.

Or so Arthur Less, the protagonist of “ Less ,” Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 novel, is forced to conclude. Less, like Greer, is a middle-aged gay white novelist; his latest manuscript, “Swift,” is a sombre tale of—what else?—a middle-aged gay white man who wanders around San Francisco à la Leopold Bloom in Dublin, suffering various setbacks and contemplating his regrets. Less is shocked when his publisher rejects it outright. “It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that,” a lesbian friend explains. The book, as even Less comes to see, has been artistically petrified by his character’s self-pity, that “gorgon of Caucasian male ego.” It’s as good as dead.

Then Less has an idea. What if he rewrote his tragedy as a farce? Inspiration flows: “With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining.” Laughter suddenly replaces sighs and tears, and a holy fool steps in for a puffed-up hero.

Less’s strategy is also the strategy of “Less.” The novel maintains a delicious comic buoyancy as it follows the antics of its Buster Keatonish protagonist , buffeting him with one obstacle after another only to have him land, each time, on his feet. Dramatic irony usually casts readers as Cassandras: we watch with dread as unsuspecting characters meet with disaster. But what makes Less so endearing is his sincere ignorance of his good luck. Though Less himself is writing a “gay ‘Ulysses,’ ” the scope of his own journeys is more Homeric than Joycean; he leaves his home in San Francisco to travel to Mexico, then Italy, Germany, France, Morocco, India, and Japan, funding his exploits with teaching gigs, magazine assignments, and the like. The cause of all this wandering is Less’s desire to escape the impending wedding of his former lover Freddy Pelu, an English teacher some fifteen years his junior, whom Less, whether in the spirit of unpossessive generosity (as he wants to believe) or for fear of rejection (the truth), unwisely let get away. But Freddy is closer at hand than Less suspects: he’s the book’s affectionate, rueful narrator. How can he know what Less is doing, never mind thinking and feeling, from the other side of the world? He can’t, of course, and that imaginative leap is part of the book’s charm, the key to its romantic optimism. Telling Less’s story is Freddy’s way of keeping watch over him. You cheer for the couple’s reunion, though hapless Less proves such an enjoyable travelling companion that it’s bittersweet to bid him goodbye as he returns to California to find Freddy waiting for him with open arms.

Apparently, Greer felt the same way, because he has brought Less back, in “ Less Is Lost ” (Little, Brown), a sequel that picks up the plot nine months later. Freddy has moved into Less’s little house, called the Shack, and wants to get married. Less isn’t so sure. “This is the story of a crisis in our lives,” Freddy, enlisted again as the omniscient narrator, reports. Another one, so soon?

As the novel begins, it is Freddy who is far from home, on a sabbatical in Maine to study “narrative form.” On the verge of flying east to join him, Less learns that his first great love, the renowned poet Robert Brownburn, has died. The two men met on a San Francisco beach when Less was a svelte twenty-one and Robert was more than two decades older and married (to a woman—this was 1987). In fact, it is Robert’s ex-wife, Marian, who gives Less the bad news. And there’s more. The Shack belonged to Robert; when Robert left Less, after fifteen years together, he left him the house, too. Now Marian tells Less that he owes ten years of back rent. If he doesn’t come up with the money in a month, he and Freddy are out.

Less assures Freddy that he has a plan. He’s been asked to write a magazine profile of a best-selling science-fiction writer, H. H. H. Mandern, and is serving on the committee for a fancy literary prize, which entails some kind of honorarium. Also, a Louisiana-based drama troupe is offering Less an improbably fat sum to adapt one of his short stories for the stage and has invited him to tag along on its tour. Freddy manages to douse his skepticism in the name of love, but this reader had a harder time. San Francisco is among the most expensive rental markets in the country; the man needs a MacArthur grant, not a magazine assignment. In any case, the money is merely a pretext for Greer to send Less on another roving adventure, this one across the continental United States, beginning in Palm Springs, where he meets up with the gruff, shambolic Mandern—a George R. R. Martin type who enlists Less to chauffeur him and his pug across the Southwest in an old camper van—and ending in Delaware, Less’s home state. The novel advances by way of a series of road-trip encounters with characters who are mostly also “characters,” like Arathusa, who leads an off-the-grid Arizona commune and whose personal motto is “Know no no ,” and Miss Dorothy Howe-Gorbaty, the head of the theatre troupe, a steel magnolia with a penchant for dancing the Carolina shag. Less, who gets custody of the van, and the dog, after Mandern makes his exit, spends a great deal of time in R.V. parks—where he nervously tries to camouflage his sexuality by purchasing “a red bandanna, wraparound sunglasses, a HOOT ’N’ HOLLER T-shirt, flip-flops, a baseball cap, a cowboy hat, a bolo tie, and six miniature American flags”—and in beer bars, including one in Alabama where a patron surprises him by asking, “thoughtfully,” what it’s like to be gay. So much for disguises.

Homophobia isn’t a serious risk in the benign world of the “Less” books. The real threat comes in the form of the accusation—lobbed, inevitably, by a fellow middle-aged white gay male writer—that Less is a “bad gay,” too conciliatory to hetero sensibilities in his prose. The charge stings because Less fears that it may be true, and not just on the page. “When he moved to New York after college, in the eighties,” Freddy tells us, “Arthur Less certainly tried his hardest to be gay”:

He joined a gym that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a political party that turned out to believe a conspiracy theory about government health clinics. He joined a German-language society that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a book group that turned out to be only for a political party. He joined a role-playing game club that turned out to be a sex dungeon. He joined a sex dungeon that turned out to be a government health clinic. It was all so confusing.

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This deadpan passage is typical of Greer’s best comic writing, with its exquisite attention to rhythm, repetition, and timing, the bright sentences tossed up like juggling balls to be caught in dazzling rotation.

Sexuality is one kind of performance. Nationality is another. Less’s countrymen often mistake him for a foreigner, a fair confusion when it comes to a member of that dreaded coastal caste, the publishing world, “which, like an orbiting space station, looks upon the rest of America without ever interacting with it.” To a globe-trotting “Minor American Novelist,” nowhere could be more exotic than America itself. Greer, a resident of San Francisco and Milan—the one in Italy, not to be confused with those in Georgia, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, New Mexico, or New York—is gamely implicating himself. His acknowledgments include a note of thanks to the Guggenheim Foundation “for the grant that allowed for all the RV rentals.” He, too, has charted a course across the country’s great middle, and his findings, or Less’s, are often lovely. “You would think nothing would be as well oiled as the derricks pumping along the Mississippi River. And yet they squeak all night,” one perfect postcard of a paragraph reads.

Where Greer runs into trouble is in his attempt to use Less’s trip to gesture at the state of the Union writ large, an ambition that he signals early. At a gathering following Robert’s funeral, a smug Czech editor accuses Less of provincialism. Has he seen anything of his country beyond “New York, Boston, San Francisco?” And, speaking of his country, has he ever so much as wondered “if it’s wrong? The whole idea?” Less must admit that “the notion has never occurred to him.” Critiquing the American experiment has become something of a trope in the current political climate, but, though Greer’s novel is set in the approximate present, his America is a land curiously devoid of politics. Less manages to drive three thousand miles without coming across so much as a single MAGA hat; there seems to have been no major public-health crisis since AIDS .

“The American berserk,” as Philip Roth called the nation’s general resting state, has never been berserker. Other American satirists—Paul Beatty comes immediately to mind—have sparked to the country’s extremity. Greer, though, has a gentler sensibility. He wants to see the best in people, and that rare instinct puts him in a bind. How to confront the madness, let alone the viciousness, the violence, the cruelty, of the moment while maintaining the kind of comic equipoise that he prizes?

One answer is to spike the humor with harsher stuff. Freddy, so genially tolerant of his lover’s foibles in “Less,” takes on an edge in “Less Is Lost.” A self-described “pasticcio” of “Italian, Spanish, and Mexican heritages,” he is now dealt the thankless task of chiding Less for his white-male myopia. When Less is left stupefied after unknowingly sampling some hallucinogenic blueberries foisted on him by a trio of German tourists, Freddy reflects, “The world is so constructed that men like you will always end up safe. Almost always.” A few pages later, when Less finds himself riding a donkey down a ravine on Navajo land: “I hope Arthur Less realizes he knows nothing, nothing at all, about the people who once lived here, or those who live here now.” These appliqué indictments have the awkward feel of authorial preëmption; it’s as if Greer felt the need to make a show of taking his character to task for being categorically “problematic.” Perhaps to compensate, he saddles Less with emotional baggage (a dead mother, a long-absent father) that hints at painful depths without really creating them. These are “Swift”-ian touches, and they work no better in Greer’s novel than they evidently did in Less’s.

Freddy, though, isn’t just exasperated by Less. He’s jealous, too, of Less’s youthful love for Robert, and worries that he’ll never be able to take his predecessor’s place. That rawer, truer vein of feeling gives the novel back its heart. If “Less Is Lost” is, well, a lesser work than “Less,” there’s something sincerely winning in Greer’s undogmatic brand of small-c conservatism. Like Freddy, Greer is a believer: in love and, even more old-fashioned, in marriage. That ancient, flawed, astoundingly persistent institution gives Greer his strongest metaphor for the country’s predicament:

America, how’s your marriage? Your two-hundred-fifty-year-old promise to stay together in sickness and in health? First thirteen states, then more and more, until fifty of you had taken the vow. Like so many marriages, I know, it was not for love; I know it was for tax reasons, but soon you all found yourself financially entwined, with shared debts and land purchases and grandiose visions of the future, yet somehow, from the beginning, essentially at odds. Ancient grudges. That split you had—that still stings, doesn’t it? Who betrayed whom, in the end? I hear you tried getting sober. That didn’t last, did it?

What you’re hearing, mixed in with the humor, is melancholy. “If it can’t work for you, can it work for any of us?” Freddy asks. He’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Traditional comedy culminates in a wedding, traditional tragedy in death. We can’t presume to know how the American story, that insane and unprecedented jumble of genres, will end, but Less and Freddy’s story is another matter. No one’s private world is shielded from national storms, but often enough the sun does shine there. We need some novels to remind us of that, and this is one. ♦

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Less (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Novel (The Arthur Less Books, 1) Paperback – Special Edition, August 2, 2022

• Book 1 of 2 The Arthur Less Books
• Print length 272 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Back Bay Books
• Publication date August 2, 2022
• ISBN-10 0316479284
• ISBN-13 978-0316479288
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Back Bay Books; Special Edition (August 2, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316479284
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316479288
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.11 pounds

About the author

Andrew sean greer.

Andrew Sean Greer is the bestselling author of seven works of fiction, including The Confessions of Max Tivoli, which was named a best book of 2004 by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Chicago Tribune. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, the O Henry award for short fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Public Library. His novel Less won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it's follow-up, Less Is Lost, is out Sept 2022. Greer lives in San Francisco and Milan.

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LESS IS LOST

by Andrew Sean Greer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 20, 2022

If you loved the first one, you might love this, though it is a bit less fresh and a tad slow.

The notorious “middle-aged gay white novelist” Arthur Less is on the road again, this time stateside.

It feels churlish to dislike this book, which deploys all the tropes and tricks and brings back many of the characters that won its predecessor, Less , the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2018. The narrator/puppet master, Freddy Pelu, whose identity was concealed until the end of the first book, has now spent a decade living in bliss with Less in San Francisco in a lovely home they call the Shack. Freddy gets back in the narration biz to tell the story of Less’ abrupt departure on a cross-country tour to raise desperately needed funds, as the estate of his old lover, the freshly dead poet Robert Brownburn, has presented him with a bill for 10 years of back rent for the Shack. And off he goes, this time through the American Southwest, South, and Middle Atlantic, driving a camper van named Rosina with a black pug named Dolly, affecting baseball caps and other Walmart-wear in hopes of appearing less Dutch. (“You from the Netherlands?” is one of the many ways people present their suspicion that he's gay.) As in Book 1, we get plenty of inside humor about all aspects of the writer’s life—prize committees, foundation grants, literary agents (Less’ is known as “Hello-I-have-Peter-Hunt-on-the-line-please-hold”), and writers with the same name. Yes, there is another Arthur Less, but unlike ours, who is shelved in Queer Authors, the other is shelved in Black Authors. Both are too small-time for General Fiction. Greer does sometimes write beautifully about life (a touching moment occurs when Less realizes he has to go through Robert’s death without Robert) and about fiction. “Robbery: friends mined for stories; lovers for sentiment; history for structure; family for secrets; small talk for sorrow; sorrow for comedy; comedy for gold.” “It's protagonists all the way down.” And, of novelists: “For are we not that fraction of old magic that remains?” Best case scenario, yes, but it's getting a little fractional this time.

Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-316-49890-6

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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Kirkus Prize winner

National Book Award Finalist

A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

GENERAL FICTION

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by Hanya Yanagihara

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Canada’s Sophie Grégoire Trudeau wants to be your next lifestyle guru

Trudeau, recently separated from her husband, justin trudeau, is rebranding herself in a new book, ‘closer together.’ billed as a memoir, it has little dish..

Former unofficial first lady of Canada Sophie Grégoire Trudeau may be a publishing genius. Her new book, “ Closer Together ,” with the cover photo of its telegenic author turned toward the reader, presents as a memoir, a beckoning. It suggests that she might spill samovars of tea about her nearly two decades of marriage to the beguiling, ever-youthful Justin Trudeau, a man who easily tops any list of World Leaders We Would Date.

In a recent profile in Vogue , the yoga instructor and accomplished outdoorswoman teased readers with her sense of abandon, likening herself to “a wild horse in a stall.” There are times, she said, when “I just want to run in a field.” This is not one of those times.

Granted, she wrote and submitted the manuscript before she knew she and the prime minister would separate, but Grégoire Trudeau’s new book is true to its subtitle, “Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other,” a tome of impassioned self-improvement with barely a soupçon of political history.

To be sure, Grégoire Trudeau is a master of intimacy and sharing — but not too much.

She tells us about the challenges of dealing with an eating disorder, infertility, her loneliness as an only child, her anxieties. She’s candid about her emotional struggles without being even remotely open about the most compelling aspects of her extraordinary life.

Readers learn almost nothing about what it was like to be married to the Canadian prime minister of almost nine years — the couple separated in August — and the demands of her role. True, they are still married and share the raising of their children, and Trudeau remains Canada’s leader, but, honestly, she makes Melania Trump seem loquacious by comparison.

Justin Trudeau enters nearly midway through the book. “To make a long story short, we went for dinner in Montreal, and then ice cream, and then karaoke, and then back to his place,” she writes. Before driving her home from a date in 2003, the budding politician informed her: “I’m 31 years old. I’ve been waiting for you for 31 years. Should we skip the girlfriend phase and start with fiancée?”

Why shorten this story? It’s a great story. Surely, there are more. By the next page — poof! — the enchanted Québécois disappears. Operas and extended miniseries could be devoted to Grégoire Trudeau’s exquisite mother-in-law, Margaret, who dated Jack Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal, kept company with Ted Kennedy and Mick Jagger , and graced Studio 54. What do we learn of her? “She has an incredible sense of humor.” And what of Grégoire Trudeau’s late father-in-law, former prime minister Pierre Trudeau? All we are told is that he and Grégoire Trudeau shared a love for the same brand of packaged oatmeal cookies. (For the record, they’re Dad’s .)

Early in her tenure as unofficial first lady (Canada doesn’t formally recognize the wives of its prime ministers as official, so it grants them almost no budget), Grégoire Trudeau touched off a firestorm when she requested additional funds to manage family and public duties. Does she mention this? No, she does not.

Instead, we have a book exquisitely dedicated to this wellness moment. We accompany Grégoire Trudeau on a journey of radical self-acceptance with her clinic of experts. She acquires a “universal emotional library,” a corpulent glossary of buzzy, Goopy concepts which includes a “patriarchy primer” and insights into “mindful masculinity.” She informs us that sleep is good. Screens are bad. Exercise is great, especially in nature. Resilience? We are so far above resilience. We have moved on to “thrivancy,” which is “five steps higher than” resiliency.

She devotes many pages to Stephen Porges’s debated polyvagal theory, “how an unregulated nervous system makes it difficult for a person to build a relationship of trust with themselves and with others,” even though, by her own admission, “some experts say his theory remains unproven .”

It is easy to like Grégoire Trudeau. She’s curious, earnest and a superb interviewer, her book studded with conversations with specialists, plus quizzes and so many tips to becoming our better selves.

It is less easy to admire the former talk show host’s prose. “Closer Together” is composed in TED-Talkese, geared more toward an audio audience than visual readers. It’s blemished with too many announced intentions like “whom we will hear from later,” “as readers of this chapter have discovered” and “We’re going to get into some science here, but stay with me; I promise it will be worth it.” This is groan-inducing “writing” that celebrities and self-help authorities are permitted, and that smart editors should excise on initial reading and banish from this Earth. Frankly, “Closer Together” reads like an extended proposal for a wellness talk show. I hope she lands one. She has already launched a communications company and will publish a children’s book next year.

Let’s be honest, as Grégoire Trudeau might wish us to be. Would she have landed this book contract, would Hillary Clinton and Arianna Huffington have blurbed its wonders, would Vogue have profiled her, would we be reading and reviewing her work if Trudeau wasn’t her last name? Well, no.

Throughout “Closer Together,” in her many informative Q&As, she refers to herself as Sophie Grégoire, sans the Canadian baggage of Trudeau, while being constantly surprised that so many authorities would share their time with the prime minister’s longtime wife.

She has our attention. She’s told the story she wished to share, not necessarily the one we wanted — and therein lies her genius.

Karen Heller is the former national features writer for The Washington Post.

Closer Together

Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each Other

By Sophie Grégoire Trudeau

Random House Canada. 294 pp. $30

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Taylor Swift's 'Tortured Poets' is written in blood

On Taylor Swift's 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , her artistry is tangled up in the details of her private life and her deployment of celebrity. But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself is audible throughout the album. Beth Garrabrant /Courtesy of the artist hide caption

On Taylor Swift's 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , her artistry is tangled up in the details of her private life and her deployment of celebrity. But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak to and for anyone but herself is audible throughout the album.

For all of its fetishization of new sounds and stances, pop music was born and still thrives by asking fundamental questions. For example, what do you do with a broken heart? That's an awfully familiar one. Yet romantic failure does feel different every time. Its isolating sting produces a kind of obliterating possessiveness: my pain, my broken delusions, my hope for healing. A broken heart is a screaming baby demanding to be held and coddled and nurtured until it grows up and learns how to function properly. This is as true in the era of the one-percent glitz goddess as it was when blues queens and torch singers organized society's crying sessions. It's true of Taylor Swift , who's equated songwriting with the heart's recovery since she released " Teardrops on my Guitar " 18 years ago, and whose 11th album, The Tortured Poets Department , is as messy and confrontational as a good girl's work can get, blood on her pages in a classic shade of red.

Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and 50 more albums coming out this spring

Turning the Tables

Taylor swift is the 21st century's most disorienting pop star.

Back in her Lemonade days, when her broken heart turned her into a bearer of revolutionary spirit, Swift's counterpart and friendly rival, Beyoncé , got practical, advising her listeners that while feelings do need tending, a secured bank account is what counts. "Your best revenge is your paper," she sang .

For Swift, the best revenge is her pen. One of the first Tortured Poets songs revealed back in February (one of the album's many bonus tracks, it turns out, but a crucial framing device) is called " The Manuscript "; in it, a woman re-reads her own scripted account of a "torrid love affair." Screenwriting is one of a few literary ambitions Swift aligns with this project. At The Grove mall in Los Angeles, Swift partnered with Spotify to create a mini-library where new lyrics were inscribed in weathered books and on sheets of parchment in the days leading up to its release. The scene was a fans' photo op invoking high art and even scripture. In the photographs of the installation that I saw, every bound volume in the library bears Swift's name. The message is clear: When Taylor Swift makes music, she authors everything around her.

For years, Swift has been pop's leading writer of autofiction , her work exploring new dimensions of confessional songwriting, making it the foundation of a highly mediated public-private life. The standard line about her teasing lyrical disclosures (and it's correct on one level) is that they're all about fueling fan interest. But on Tortured Poets , she taps into a much more established and respected tradition. Using autobiography as a sword of justice is a move as ancient as the women saints who smote abusive fathers and priests in the name of an early Christian Jesus; in our own time, just among women, it's been made by confessional poets like Sylvia Plath, memoirists from Maya Angelou to Joyce Maynard and literary stars like the Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux. And, of course, Swift's reluctant spiritual mother, Joni Mitchell .

Even in today's blather-saturated cultural environment, a woman speaking out after silence can feel revolutionary; that this is an honorable act is a fundamental principle within many writers' circles. "I write out of hurt and how to make hurt okay, how to make myself strong and come home, and it may be the only home I ever have," Natalie Goldberg declares in Writing Down the Bones , the most popular writing manual of the 20th century. When on this album's title track, Swift sings, "I think some things I never say," she's making an offhand joke; but this is the album where she does say all the things she thinks, about love at least, going deeper into the personal zone that is her métier than ever before. Sharing her darkest impulses and most mortifying delusions, she fills in the blank spaces in the story of several much-mediated affairs and declares this an act of liberation that has changed and ultimately strengthened her. She spares no one, including herself; often in these songs, she considers her naiveté and wishfulness through a grown woman's lens and admits she's made a fool of herself. But she owns her heartbreak now. She alone will have the last word on its shape and its effects.

This includes other people's sides of her stories. The songs on Tortured Poets , most of which are mid- or up-tempo ballads spun out in the gossamer style that's defined Swift's confessional mode since Folklore , build a closed universe of private and even stolen moments, inhabited by only two people: Swift and a man. With a few illuminating exceptions that stray from the album's plot, she rarely looks beyond their interactions. The point is not to observe the world, but to disclose the details of one sometimes-shared life, to lay bare what others haven't seen. Tortured Poets is the culmination of a catalog full of songs in which Swift has taken us into the bedrooms where men pleasured or misled her, the bars where they charmed her, the empty playgrounds where they sat on swings with her and promised something they couldn't give. When she sings repeatedly that one of the most suspect characters on the album told her she was the love of her life, she's sharing something nobody else heard. That's the point. She's testifying under her own oath.

Swift's musical approach has always been enthusiastic and absorbent. She's created her own sounds by blending country's sturdy song structures with R&B's vibes, rap's cadences and pop's glitz; as a personality and a performer, she's all arms, hugging the world. The sound of Tortured Poets offers that familiar embrace, with pop tracks that sparkle with intelligence, and meditative ones that wrap tons of comforting aura around Swift's ruminations. Beyond a virtually undetectable Post Malone appearance and a Florence Welch duet that also serves as an homage to Swift's current exemplar/best friendly rival, Lana Del Rey , the album alternates between co-writes with Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner, the producers who have helped Swift find her mature sound, which blends all of her previous approaches without favoring any prevailing trend. There are the rap-like, conversational verses, the reaching choruses, the delicate piano meditations, the swooning synth beats. Antonoff's songs come closest to her post- 1989 chart toppers; Dessner's fulfill her plans to remain an album artist. Swift has also written two songs on her own, a rarity for her; both come as close to ferocity as she gets. As a sustained listen, Tortured Poets harkens back to high points throughout Swift's career, creating a comforting environment that both supports and balances the intensity of her storytelling.

It's with her pen that Swift executes her battle plans. As always, especially when she dwells on the work and play of emotional intimacy, her lyrics are hyper-focused, spilling over with detail, editing the mess of desire, projection, communion and pain that constitutes romance into one sharp perspective: her own. She renders this view so intensely that it goes beyond confession and becomes a form of writing that can't be disputed. Remember that parchment and her quill pen; her songs are her new testaments. It's a power play, but for many fans, especially women, this ambition to be definitive feels like a necessary corrective to the misrepresentations or silence they face from ill-intentioned or cluelessly entitled men.

"A great writer can be a dangerous creature, however gentle and nice in person," the biographer Hermione Lee once wrote . Swift has occasionally taken this idea to heart before, especially on her once-scorned, now revered hip-hop experiment, Reputation . But now she's screaming from the hilltop, sparing no one, including herself as she tries to prop up one man's flagging interest and then falls for others' duplicity. "I know my pain is such an imposition," Swift sang in last year's " You're Losing Me ," a prequel to the explosive confessional mode of Tortured Poets , where that pain grows nearly suicidal, feeds romantic obsession, and drives her to become a "functional alcoholic" and a madwoman who finds strength in chaos in a way that recalls her friend Emma Stone's cathartic performance as Bella in Poor Things . (Bella, remember, comes into self-possession by learning to read and write.) " Who's afraid of little old me? " Swift wails in the album's window-smashing centerpiece bearing that title; in " But Daddy I Love Him ," she runs around screaming with her dress unbuttoned and threatens to burn down her whole world. These accounts of unhinged behavior reinforce the message that everybody had better be scared of this album — especially her exes, but also her business associates, the media and, yes, her fans, who are not spared in her dissection of just who's made her miserable over the past few years.

Listen to the album

I'm not getting into the dirty details; those who crave them can listen to Tortured Poets themselves and easily uncover them. They're laid out so clearly that anyone who's followed Swift's overly documented life will instantly comprehend who's who: the depressive on the heath, the tattooed golden retriever in her dressing room. Here's my reading of her album-as-novel — others' interpretations may vary: Swift's first-person protagonist (let's call her "Taylor") begins in a memory of a long-ago love affair that left her melancholy but on civil terms, then has an early meeting with a tempting rogue, who declares he's the Dylan Thomas to her Patti Smith; no, she says, though she's sorely tempted, we're "modern idiots," and she leaves him behind for a while. Then we get scenes from a stifling marriage to a despondent and distracted child-man. "So long, London," she declares, fleeing that dead end. From then on, it's the rogue on all cylinders. They connect, defy the daddy figures who think they're bad for each other, speak of rings and baby carriages. Those daddies continue to meddle in this newfound freedom.

In this main story arc, Swift writes about erotic desire as she never has before: She's "fresh out the slammer" (ouch, the rhetoric) and her bedsheets are on fire. She cannot stop rhapsodizing about this new love object and her commitment to their outlaw hunger for each other. It's " Love Story ," updated and supersized, with a proper Romeo at its center — a forbidden, tragic soulmate, a perfect match who's also a disastrous one. Swift peppers this section of Tortured Poets with name-drops ("Jack" we know, " Lucy " might be a tricky slap at Romeo, hard to tell) and instantly searchable references; he sends her a song by The Blue Nile and traces hearts on her face but tells revolting jokes in the bar and eventually reveals himself as a cad, a liar, a coward. She recovers, but not really. In the end, she does move on but still dreams of him hearing one of their songs on a jukebox and dolefully realizing the young girl he's now with has never heard it before.

Insert the names yourself. They do matter, because her backstories are key to Swift's appeal; they both keep her human-sized and amplify her fame. Swift's artistry is tied up in her deployment of celebrity, a slippery state in which a real life becomes emblematic. Like no one before, she's turned her spotlit day-to-day into a conceptual project commenting on women's freedom, artistic ambition and the place of the personal in the public sphere. As a celebrity, Swift partners with others: her model and musician friends, her actor/musician/athlete consorts, brands, even (warily) political causes. And with her fans, the co-creators of her stardom.

Her songs stand apart, though. They remain the main vehicle through which, negotiating unimaginable levels of renown, Swift continually insists on speaking only for herself. A listener has to work to find the "we" in her soliloquies. There are plenty of songs on Tortured Poets in which others will find their own experiences, from the sultry blue eroticism of " Down Bad " to the click of recognition in " I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can) ." But Swift's lack of concern about whether these songs speak for and to anyone besides herself is audible throughout the album. It's the sound of her freedom.

Taylor Swift: Tiny Desk Concert

She also confronts the way fame has cost her, fully exploring questions she raised on Reputation and in " Anti-Hero ." There are hints, more than hints, that her romance with the rogue was derailed partly because her business associates found it problematic, a danger to her precious reputation. And when she steps away from the man-woman predicament, Swift ponders the ephemeral reality of the success that has made private decisions nearly impossible. A lovely minuet co-written with Dessner, " Clara Bow " stages a time-lapsed conversation between Swift and the power players who've helped orchestrate her rise even as she knows they won't be concerned with her eventual obsolescence. "You look like Clara Bow ," they say, and later, "You look like Stevie Nicks in '75." Then, a turn: "You look like Taylor Swift," the suits (or is it the public, the audience?) declare. "You've got edge she never did." The song ends abruptly — lights out. This scene, redolent of All About Eve , reveals anxieties that all of Swift's love songs rarely touch upon.

One reason Swift went from being a normal-level pop star to sharing space with Beyoncé as the era's defining spirit is because she is so good at making the personal huge, without fussing over its translation into universals. In two decades of talking back to heartbreakers, Swift has called out gaslighting, belittling, neglect, false promises — all the hidden injuries that lovers inflict on each other, and that a sexist society often overlooks or forgives more easily from men. In "The Manuscript," which calls back to a romantic trauma outside the Tortured Poets frame, she sings of being a young woman with an older man making "coffee in a French press" and then "only eating kids cereal" and sleeping in her mother's bed when he dumps her; any informed Swift fan's mind will race to songs and headlines about cads she's previously called out in fan favorites like "Dear John" and "All Too Well" — the beginnings of the mission Tortured Poets fulfills.

Reviews of more Taylor Swift albums on NPR

In the haze of 'Midnights,' Taylor Swift softens into an expanded sound

Let's Talk About Taylor Swift's 'Folklore'

Show And Tell: On 'Lover,' Taylor Swift Lets Listeners In On Her Own Terms

The Old Taylor's Not Dead

The Many New Voices Of Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift Leaps Into Pop With 'Red'

Swift's pop side (and perhaps her co-writers' influence) shows in the way she balances the claustrophobic referentiality of her writing with sparkly wordplay and well-crafted sentimental gestures. On Tortured Poets , she's less strategic than usual. She lets the details fall the way they would in a confession session among besties, not trying to change them from painful memories into points of connection. She's just sharing. Swift bares every crack in her broken heart as a way of challenging power structures, of arguing that emotional work that men can sidestep is still expected from women who seem to own the world.

Throughout Tortured Poets, Swift is trying to work out how emotional violence occurs: how men inflict it on women and women cultivate it within themselves. It's worth asking how useful such a brutal evisceration of one privileged private life can be in a larger social or political sense; critics, including NPR's Leah Donnella in an excellent 2018 essay on the limits of the songwriter's reach, have posed that question about Swift's work for years. But we should ask why Swift's work feels so powerful to so many — why she has become, in the eyes of millions, a standard-bearer and a freedom fighter. Unlike Beyoncé, who loves a good emblem and is always thinking about history and serving the culture and communities she claims, Swift is making an ongoing argument about smaller stories still making a difference. Her callouts can be viewed as petty, reflecting entitlement or even narcissism. But they're also part of her wrestling with the very notion of significance and challenging hierarchies that have proven to be so stubborn they can feel intractable. That Swift has reached such a peak of influence in the wake of the #MeToo movement isn't an accident; even as that chapter in feminism's history can seem to be closing, she insists on saying, "believe me." That isn't the same as saying "believe all women," but by laying claim to disputed storylines and fighting against silence, she at the very least reminds listeners that such actions matter.

Listening to Tortured Poets , I often thought of "The Last Day of Our Acquaintance," a song that Sinéad O'Connor recorded when she was in her young prime, not yet banished from the mainstream for her insistence on speaking politically. Like Swift's best work, its lyrics are very specific — allegedly about a former manager and lover — yet her directness and conviction expand their reach. In 1990, that a woman in her mid-20s would address a belittling man in this way felt startling and new. Taylor Swift came to prominence in a culture already changing to make room for such testimonies, if not — still — fully able to honor them. She has made it more possible for them to be heard. "I talk and you won't listen to me," O'Connor wailed . "I know your answer already." Swift doesn't have to worry about whether people will listen. But she knows that this could change. That's why she is writing it all down.

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5 Strategies for Improving Mental Health at Work

• Morra Aarons-Mele

Benefits and conversations around mental health evolved during the pandemic. Workplace cultures are starting to catch up.

Companies are investing in — and talking about — mental health more often these days. But employees aren’t reporting a corresponding rise in well-being. Why? The author, who wrote a book on mental health and work last year, explores several key ways organizations haven’t gone far enough in implementing a culture of well-being. She also makes five key suggestions on what they can do to improve the mental health of their employees.

“I have never felt so seen.”

• Morra Aarons-Mele is a workplace mental health consultant and author of  The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears Into Your Leadership Superpower (Harvard Business Review Press, 2023). She has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, O the Oprah Magazine, TED, among others, and is the host of the Anxious Achiever podcast from LinkedIn Presents. morraam

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A Novel of Lost Daughters and Waylaid Lives

Prison, pregnancies and other operatic turns propel Caroline Leavitt’s latest book, “Days of Wonder.”

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By Michael Callahan

Michael Callahan’s third novel, “The Lost Letters From Martha’s Vineyard,” will be published in May.

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DAYS OF WONDER, by Caroline Leavitt

When the unfairness of life overwhelms you, does it bring out your grit and resolve, or send you down a rabbit hole of grievance and desperation?

Such is the crossroads facing three deeply damaged people in Caroline Leavitt’s 12th novel, “Days of Wonder”: Ella Fitchburg, newly released from prison after being convicted of trying to poison her wealthy boyfriend’s father; her teenage love, Jude, a victim of domestic abuse who’s lugging his own millstone of guilt; and Ella’s mother, Helen, who was cruelly cast out of her Hasidic Jewish community as a pregnant teenager.

Ella, too, is pregnant when she begins her 25-year sentence, but is pressed to give the baby girl up for adoption. Freed nearly two decades early thanks to a governor’s intervention, Ella, now 22, tracks down the child, who has been adopted and named Carla, and hastily moves from Brooklyn to Ann Arbor, Mich., to be close to her — without disclosing her real identity to her daughter’s new parents. A cross between Sylvia Plath’s sardonic Esther Greenwood and Allison McKenzie from “Peyton Place” (the Mia Farrow iteration), Ella mostly covets security and a bigger place in the world, clinging to a deluded dream of her, Jude, Carla and a life they can never have.

All along we feel Ella’s deep longing, her pain at having been so spectacularly cheated by life. Alas, that doesn’t prevent her from coming off as a creepy stalker: She hides in a back booth at the bar where her daughter’s new dad works, pops up like a disturbed jack-in-the-box to sneak cellphone pictures of Carla and anonymously leaves knitted mittens in the family mailbox.

We’re also asked to sustain some serious suspension of disbelief. Despite a closed adoption, Ella quickly discovers her daughter’s location when a lawyer sloppily exposes a file with the family’s address; Ella meets Carla after the little girl’s errant ball miraculously rolls in front of her feet at a playground, a trope for the ages. Perhaps most ludicrous: With zero experience Ella lands a job as a freelance “Dear Abby”-style columnist for a weekly newspaper in Ann Arbor and is able to support herself on it. That’s worthy of the same eyeroll we collectively delivered when Carrie Bradshaw was somehow able to afford all those Cosmos and pricey shoes.

Leavitt is clearly in her element here: Her previous novels are a soapy collection of women experiencing pain, regret and, ultimately, redemption. But the task of untangling the characters’ myriad secrets and the foggy mystery that binds Ella, Jude and Helen together is harrowing, and leads to some cutting of corners (Ella’s alacrity at becoming best friends with Carla’s adoptive mother seems a tad convenient). It also results in a denouement that feels as overly tidy and soulless as a sample home.

While it moves intermittently between the trio’s individual story lines, the narrative is largely driven by Ella — Jude and Helen seem to serve as more of a supporting cast, present to both reflect her pain and mark the road of broken promises she’s trudged. The sometimes clichéd plotting is helped by Leavitt’s graceful prose: Ella sees her mother as “a dry, twisted sponge that could no longer expand”; falling for the high school dreamboat Jude, she finds herself out of her depth in his social circle, not knowing “how to dress in the casually-mussed way of the teenage elite”; upon release from prison, she threads her way through a throng of reporters, “their voices like thorns.”

The novel’s title is a tad misleading; the book is far less about wondrous days than about the tenacity required to survive life’s bad ones. Ultimately — and despite enough melodrama for “General Hospital” — it heralds the power of steady perseverance, sturdy faith and the raw restorative power of love.

DAYS OF WONDER | By Caroline Leavitt | Algonquin | 320 pp. | $29

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The dangerous fallout from Baby Reindeer: should Richard Gadd have been less honest about his abusers?

The internet is rife with speculation about the real-life stalker and real-life abuser from the Netflix hit. Is this show about exploitation starting to seem uncomfortably careless – even exploitative?

B aby Reindeer was only released a little over a week ago, and already it has become a sensation. Richard Gadd’s adaptation of his 2019 Edinburgh festival one-man show , which in turn was a dramatisation of the ordeals he had been through at the hands of a stalker and a powerful abuser respectively, has not only been the most watched Netflix show in the UK, but made the top 10 in 12 other countries.

And quite right too, since it’s as gripping and queasy and uncomfortable a show as you’re ever likely to see. But unintended consequences can come with success. The narrative surrounding Baby Reindeer has moved away from the show this week and into the real world. Besides its lead, the show is essentially about two people: a middle-aged woman who spent years inundating Gadd with thousands of unwanted messages to the detriment of his wellbeing, and a successful older writer who subjected Gadd to a prolonged period of sexual abuse . And while Baby Reindeer attempted to gloss over the true identity of these figures, the internet has, unfortunately, been busy.

In recent days, online sleuths have found online accounts purportedly belonging to Gadd’s real-life stalker , and have been speculating wildly about the identity of his abuser. This reached fever pitch on Monday, meaning Gadd had to dampen things down on Instagram. He said that people he loves and admires were “unfairly getting caught up in speculation. Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be. That’s not the point of our show.”

Which might be true, since Baby Reindeer is a complex drama. But any show that openly states it is based on a true story will always invite internet detectives. And if the result of that is that innocent people are now being wrongly accused of being abusers online, that’s a problem. The tension at the heart of Baby Reindeer is that the story is real. Gadd was stalked, and suffered abuse. And the knowledge that these things happened gives the whole endeavour its electric charge. But equally, the knowledge that the writer and star is retelling traumas that he endured also means that the series cannot be viewed solely as a work of art.

People were always going to start trying to join the dots. The internet has done so for decades. Even Fleabag , a much less thematically explosive show, drew a similar level of attention, to the extent that Phoebe Waller-Bridge publicly expressed regret for harming her family by not protecting them from all the guesswork. This is the wider context in which Baby Reindeer was released, and to have not seen this coming seems like an oversight on the part of Netflix.

It could all have have been prevented so easily. In some of the press reports about Baby Reindeer, Gadd has suggested that a huge effort had gone into separating the fictional stalker from the real-life stalker as a way of protecting the latter from undue attention. Yet enough details of her life, and her messaging, are included in the drama that amateur investigators immediately set about trying to identify her. Similarly, regardless of the actual identity of Gadd’s abuser, the show has resulted in several people in the public eye being hounded by speculation. Wouldn’t it have been safer to fudge the details more comprehensively?

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True, the show is based on a stage show that made the reality of Gadd’s experiences even more explicit, but the percentage of Netflix’s 269 million subscribers with a working knowledge of Edinburgh fringe shows from half a decade ago is presumably quite small. Leaving off the “true story” disclaimer could have thrown the majority of people off the scent.

It has become hard to think of Baby Reindeer the show without considering the fallout it has generated. While the instinct might have initially been to see Gadd as brave for so fearlessly retelling the story of what must have been an impossibly harrowing time, it’s now difficult to see it free of the consequences it has brought on itself.

There’s nothing entertaining or fun about the worst percentage of the internet doxing women with mental health problems, or scattergunning accusations of abuse at celebrities for fun, and yet this is what has happened. Baby Reindeer has cemented its status as one of the year’s most uncomfortable shows.

In the UK, the National Stalking Helpline is on 0808 802 0300 or email via their inquiry form . In the US, resources are available at stalkingawareness.org .

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‘I was severely stalked and severely abused’: Richard Gadd on the true story behind Baby Reindeer

Baby Reindeer review – features the most chilling TV episode of the entire year

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