Andrew Sean Greer

Less Is Lost

Laura Dobie

This clumsiness of the heart also became apparent on a certain California road trip: Less was equipped only with his lover, an old Saab, and some hastily purchased camping equipment consisting of two intra-zipping sleeping bags and a large nylon disk. This disk, of Swiss manufacture, unfolded into a tent whose vast interior defied belief; Less was fascinated by its pockets, air vents, rain flies; its stitching, netting, and circular Guggenheim ceiling. But, like the Swiss, it was neutral; it did not love him back.

Sure of his infallibility, he unzipped the insect mesh and let in a rowdy bachelorette party of mosquitoes that raided the human open bar; he even zipped the sleeping bags to the ceiling. And on the final day, when a wild downpour arrived at lunchtime, it was decided that, while the tent could be trusted, Less himself could not. A hotel must be booked.

“When I was teaching in Padua, my sister died. I've told you that. I went into the Scrovegni Chapel there to look at the Giottos and I felt nothing. But I made myself look. He painted that chapel in 1305. Dante visited him. And in the scene of the Slaughter of the Innocents is one of the first realistic depictions of human tears. How they leave a trail down the cheek and hang for a moment on the jaw before falling. Someone noticed, seven hundred years ago. Someone knew my pain.” He put Less's glass on the table. “That's what you have to do. Pay attention. It's not for yourself, It's for someone seven hundred years from now.”

"What if the whole idea of America is wrong?" What should he do with this man? Strangle him? Salute him? Put him in a novel?

I know this face, as Less himself might have if a flourish of trumpeting eighteen-wheelers did not focus him back on the road. It is the expression of vanity, heartache, and ecstasy; genesis, joy, and destruction. I know it precisely. Talking to people and listening to nothing they utter, noticing just how they touch the small scar on the temple. Hearing only the Michigan accent they're trying to hide. Shaking with sobs in the morning and pouring the wine, with a smile, over dinner. Robbery: friends mined for stories; lovers for sentiment; history for structure; family for secrets; small talk for sorrow; sorrow for comedy: comedy for gold. Then triumph. A satisfied curl of the lip that is not for work done, and well done, but for doing a thing that has never been done.

Less sighs a little. Reading an Overman novel is like being put in the care of a neglectful uncle; any character might die, any violent memory might appear, any drug might be shot into any vein.

With a jolt. and too late, Less realizes Dolly has been his companion across the country, that he has gotten as used to her snore as he has to my own, as used to her nightly danse Apache and absurdities and rituals as he has to my sleeping bonnet, and that they will not, in all likelihood, see each other again. Less reaches out, but Xiomara is already departing and her umbrella hides any attempt by Dolly to look back. Anyway, dogs never say goodbye.

The most popular street name in America is Second Street (First replaced mainly by Main), and it is on Second and Elm (no elm) that Rosina takes her final turn. The cockpit lights up, the engine gives a telltale death rattle, a shudder passes through her system from nose to tail, and she voids, through her exhaust, a puff of white smoke such as the Vatican emits when it has chosen a pope. From this moment, she is never to speak again.

Less comes to understand that life for some goes smoothly, as free from incident as it is perhaps from poetry; a fainter kind of happiness than Less has ever perceived. We are all having different experiences.

For while our middle-aged author would probably consider himself a Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, certainly never a protagonist, the truth of existence has not quite pierced his soul: That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

Less Is Lost quotes

Join the club