What a book. I listened to it all the way through in almost one day. It is 8 hours long. I spent Tuesday December 1, 2020 with Andrew Sean Greer. His story of Arthur Less will live with me forever probably. It is nearly a perfect work. Not just because I read it all in one day, but it felt like this book arrived to him fully formed. It was so quick, so effortlessly told, that it seems sort of like I was constantly waiting from him to begin the difficult portion of the book, but it never came. The love that he lost in the beginning of the book, the echoes of the former love that sort of lived in the way of the other one, all seemed to keep him sort of lost in between the two poles that everything else sort of just drifted through in an alluring way. There is some of the sort of cleverness of the work that I want to overlook because there is the essential portions of the book when Greer is talking about genius or literature or art that in an older novel would just sort of straightforwardly pronounce. One thing that this project of reading things at random is that it slams together things that might not have ever occurred to make a connection and Of Human Bondage resonates here where it might not otherwise.
Philip Carey and Arthur Less are similar characters in a way that mediocrity seems to be what constantly haunts them, and this fear places them in this sort of halted place through the work and you are constantly thinking that they should be doing something rather than nothing. It is this nothingness that haunts them. The torture of the German phase is unrelenting now that I think about it, which is similar to Carey’s French phase, the suicide of the girl he sort of liked in Carey’s story sticks out as a step too far in that text, like Less’s torturous boredom sickness which feels like it doesn’t ring true of the idea that Freddy is telling this tell – everything else feels like it fits inside of that thought bubble, but the German side though dream-like the absurdity works but it feels ruthless in a way that I feel jars this text a bit.
Also, the ending was unnecessary, Greer already got me with the comment from Robert and Marian now together again in the end and his life seems a brief blip in their long romance, Marian says to Less that they have take care of their Robert, it is in the sharing of the man that both signed up for at the start – they shared them with each other but they also shared him with the world or eternity or whatever, but the call back was perfectly laid there. Then, Robert explains something about time travel that only a poet could probably, the set up for it is a bit clumsy as all writing is these days that doesn’t want to take itself to seriously as irony and sarcasm has killed sincerity in the 21st century. It is in this moment though that he directly addresses aging, dying, and romance, and something terribly true is spoken between them.
It is something that I have thought about for a long time. There is a strange combination of events that leads to this being so meaningful for me. First, I have a terrible memory and I fear for a few reasons that it will only get worse. I think of myself as a sort of disappearing man. That is one of the reasons for this project. The other is that because of this feeling of impermanence I have sort to leave with others a bit of myself whenever I can. I have been with my wife, Sam, since we were kids and this is very important to me because this woman holds together my story. She has seen it all, and holds the whole thing within herself. What Robert says is true, that if you were to build a time machine you could only travel back to the moment when the time machine was first made. Robert sees Less as the boy on the beach, when the line about taking care of Robert is first said. Greer does this masterfully. Less is concerned with the idea that the person who would know him now would only know the old man, all of his friends are dying or dead already, the younger Less feels gone and this is what makes Freddy’s return so powerful if a bit over wrought because he frames the story with the first time he met Arthur.
But the Robert portion strikes more closely to me, that Robert sees Less as the young man even though they both are old. I remember when Sam was young. I don’t ever think of myself as young, I am trapped in a different moment in time, but I think of Sam as 15 standing outside of a Barnes and Noble in our hometown. She is with her loud friend, and I see her there standing in the electric lights of the parking lot in the warm night of late August before the world turned and everything felt like it could go on forever. She slammed into me like a rock in the middle of a rapids and my life was never the same again. She is a part of my heart in way that I don’t think I could ever conceive of again. I can only travel back to that moment, she will always be there, young and beautiful and scared but she wouldn’t show it. I can only see that little girl, just a girl then, small in the eyes of the world but completely unconcerned with anything else. I knew she loved me from that moment, but I never and still have never known why. Even as we are older now, even laying in that bed in the hospital 15 years later, after a lifetime of troubles, delivering our daughter Penelope, she was still that little girl to me, little Sammie Fulk, and I thought, I thought, how did I get here? And why am I so lucky to have this girl with me? What strange fortune did I happen upon? I hope to never ever give it up.
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