Back on the road: Less is Lost, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed

Get ready for more of Less: Andrew Sean Greer’s hapless novelist is back on the road. First things first: you need to have read Less, Greer’s Pulitzer-winning first outing for his creation, to appreciate this slighter but equally charming sequel. That’s no hardship. Less was hilarious and humane: a hymn to second acts. In it, Arthur Less – a tentative, faded Battenberg blond-and-pink man, around whom embarrassments and misunderstandings coalesce – scuttled across the world to avoid facing his 50th birthday and the wedding of his long-time lover Freddy to someone else, both imminent.

In Less is Lost, Arthur has a stranger and scarier destination for a West Coast homosexual: America’s heartlands. He’s trying to avoid losing the ‘Shack’, his San Francisco home, by cashing in on an unexpected flurry of paid work: writing a profile, visiting a theatre troupe, judging a literary prize and delivering a lecture tour.