I was quite taken with the first 50 pages of this book. Our hero, Less, is a graphic character and the sketch of his years as the lover of an older, famous poet are well drawn. Equally, the narrator’s voice and the writer’s eye for detail are pleasing. I particularly enjoyed a reference to, ‘the quilted sides’ of food carts in NY. Less’s impending world tour seems like an good way of setting up the plot structure and, without further ado, we are off on an adventure with the engaging Less; our interest piqued by the narrator’s anonymity.
Sadly, it was largely downhill from there. I did think the author was good at doing scenes from the literary world like writing retreats, academic departments, publishers, book awards, drinks parties and receptions. However, he also had a Franzen-esque penchant for tossing long, pretentious words into his prose for no obvious reason other than to show how erudite he is. Some of these words defied even the definitive power of Google so he really must be extraordinarily clever! For example, I couldn’t work out what the phrase ‘groupe en biscuit’ meant in either English or French. And ‘sesh’? Not an abbreviation for session judging from the context. Alongside this tendency towards elaborate vocabulary there are some really sloppy mistakes in the prose. For example, Less puts his shoes on before his trousers at the beginning of the book, there is a poorly researched poker game and the contradiction, ‘Roman generals hire slaves’; a oversight that really annoyed me! I’d have preferred clearer vocabulary and closer proofreading.
The book seems to have been written, at least partially, as a work of comedy but it isn’t very funny. From the Mexican tour guide who says everything is closed to the lame jokes about Less’s grandmother’s vagina, the attempts at humour are hackneyed and puerile. The problem is compounded by repetition. Some of the travel writing is too cliched with caricatured bell boys, taxi drivers and tour guides. However, the worst aspect of the prose was definitely the dialogue. It wasn’t universally poor but some of the central sections are very clunky. For example, Less’s first meeting with his lover-to-be the poet and his wife. The reader is in the dark about who this mysterious straight couple on the beach, recollected from Less’s 20s, are. But when the foolhardy man wants to take a dip in the stormy ocean, his wife implores young Less to go with him saying, to a background noise of narrative sections being dropped noisily into place, ‘please look after him, he’s a wonderful poet but a lousy swimmer’! Oh, the cruel irony of her inviting this seductive homosexual predator into their marital bliss! Oh, the tragedy of prose so bad that it reads like a plot summary transposed into the mouths of the characters. The whole thing felt awkward and unrefined. Less’s big chat with Carlos at the luxury resort in India is almost as clunky and equally facile. Here too, Less inexplicably doesn’t want to hear more about Freddy’s wedding even though he is allegedly mourning the love of his life. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the novel where Less pines for his lost lover. Additionally, I couldn’t quite work out the root of Carlos and Less’s animosity, which continues throughout the book but is never really explained.
There were several minor aspects of how foreign languages are presented in the book that I didn’t like either. Some of the German in this book is written in German. None of the other languages are attempted for more than a sentence. The German that is contained in the book is not translated. This is a pet hate of mine, translate it in the footnotes for goodness sake! Alongside this, there are conversations that take place in German for the purposes of the story but appear in the text as broken English literally translated from the supposed German conversation. This wasn’t attempted in any other languages. It wasn’t particularly funny and was another example of an insipid reworking of an already overworn theme - ‘the things non-native speakers say’!! It was especially unsuccessful as to really get the jokes one would have to know the German words that are being mistranslated. The fact that this was only done for German was explained by Less only being able to speak this language but, taken as a whole, the book had a weird and unpleasant mishmash of presentations. As it progressed, the structure of the world tour itinerary started to get a bit stale as Less repeated his routine of turning up somewhere, blundering about a bit, learning something very precursory about the culture, having a romantic encounter or recalling one from his past and then stumbling on!
Less, who is initially drawn as hopelessly unknown as an author, surprisingly meets lots of fans of his work during his travels. Besides these minor massages to Less’s ego, he also wins an award and has several sexual encounters that no doubt help boost his confidence in the aftermath of his breakup with Freddy. However, like the acerbic woman who’s birthday party Less attends in the desert who comments on Less’s latest protagonist, I found myself asking, ‘who cares?’ The character of Less, who had started out with such promise, had turned out to be a bit boring and shallow. The prose and the narrative, that I had initially liked, turned out to be repetitive, cliched and full of empty humour. The more interesting aspects of Less, like his feelings about his past loves and the meaning of his life, are drowned out by clunky dialogue, bad jokes and superficial travel details.
To round off the disappointing experience of finishing this book, which ended up feeling like another episode of a middling sitcom - this week on ‘Less Flounders In Foreign Lands….’ MOROCCO! - the mystery narrator was revealed as Freddy. ‘REFEREE!’, I felt like shouting, ‘surely that’s not allowed’. Freddy the narrator had described himself in the third person earlier on in the book, which excludes him from being the narrator in my mind! The narrator’s voice also felt much older than Freddy’s mid-thirties when I was reading it. It was a sloppy, half-baked end to a sloppy, half-baked book and I felt cheated! The ending was also very neat and tidy with Less returning from his travels to be reunited with his lost lover leaving me wondering what the upshot of Less’s trip was ultimately. Is the moral of the story - if you are deeply in love but your lover marries someone else then don’t say anything and go away for a bit and then he’ll realise how much he loves you? Everything seems to fall effortlessly into place for Less in the end and I found this mawkish and twee.
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