How did you come away from that trip? Did it abate your fear or reinforce it? I’m turning on my novelist’s ear and listening to those people instead of listening to myself. I love to be in uncomfortable, unlikely settings because it feels like I’m having the right reactions. I was like, “Okay, then let’s go there.” So I rented an RV for six weeks and traveled through the Southwest and Deep South, just following that novelist’s instinct. So Less, I was afraid of turning 50 and afraid of different kinds of love. Well, after the 2016 election, I thought… I always start a book with what I’m afraid of, and I write toward it. What got you interested in talking about America in this novel? Here, Greer discusses the road trip that inspired Less Is Lost and answers W’s Culture Diet questionnaire. “I wanted to talk about America, which is very hard to talk about.” The fish-out-of-water protagonist and wry, perceptive narrator of Less offered a way into the story he wanted to write. “I was writing a different novel, a road-trip novel, and struggling-as I often do-with how to tell it properly,” he says.
But when Greer began working on what would become Less Is Lost in 2018, he didn’t initially envision it as a sequel. Less Is Lost is a follow-up to 2017’s funny, poignant, Pulitzer Prize winner Less. In Less Is Lost, Arthur sets off in a camper van (name: Rosina) across the American Southwest and Deep South, accompanied by a curmudgeonly science-fiction writer and a pug. It was the kind of thing, I thought, that might happen to the novel’s protagonist, Arthur Less. And when we got on the phone earlier this month to discuss his new novel, Less Is Lost (out September 20), it felt appropriate for this saga to quickly come up in conversation. In the end, he made it to the wedding-a lengthy Uber ride later. How could such a thing happen? Perhaps, Greer suspected, other holiday travelers were having too much fun on vacation and hadn’t returned their vehicles yet? (“Who cares! Travel disasters can be wonderful!” he recently wrote in an Instagram post, describing an entirely unrelated snafu.)
It was Labor Day weekend, and the writer Andrew Sean Greer had just arrived in Bangor, Maine, en route to a wedding-only to learn that the rental car he had booked to drive to the venue was nowhere to be found.
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