A (0:06)

I'm Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at the New Yorker, and this is a podcast bonus for the New Yorker Radio Hour. Last week Andrew Sean Greer's novel Les won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Les is a biting comic account of a middle aged mid level novelist named Arthur Less who travels around the world to prize ceremonies and literary events in an attempt to outrun his own heartbreak. In June of 2017 we published an excerpt from Less in the New Yorker. Here's Andrew Sean Grier reading from that piece.

B (0:39)

Our novelist is going to Turin for a prize ceremony. Although he is not really going for a prize ceremony. He is escaping a wedding, that of young Freddy to someone named Tom. He stared at the invitation when it came in the mail, every word embossed so that even the blind could enjoy this humiliat and in his panic state, grasped at other invitations he'd received, conferences, symposia, temporary professorships in far flung locales like Mexico, Germany, Japan. Les dug them up and hastily agreed to all of them so that he could write with satisfaction on the RSVP card. Dear Freddy and Tom, my apologies, but I will be out of the country. As it turns out, Les has merely traded one indignity for a series of new ones in Mexico, Germany, Japan. But first this one in Italy, where he is nominated for a prize no one believes he will win. Not his agent, who urged him to stay home and start a new book. Not his sister who said that this was no way for a man his age to behave, and certainly not less himself. In the days leading up to the ceremony, there will be interviews, something called a confrontation with high school students, and many luncheons and dinners. He looks forward to escaping from his hotel into the streets of Turin, the secret heart of a city he's always longed to visit. Contained deep within the printed schedule was the information that he is a finalist for a lesser prize. The greater prize has already been awarded to the famous British author Foster's Lancet. He wonders if the poor man is actually coming because of the fearless has of jetlag. He asked to arrive a day before these events were to start, and for some reason the ceremony organizers acceded. A car he has been told will be waiting for him in Turin if he manages to make it there. He floats through the Frankfurt airport in a dream, thinking passport, wallet, phone. Passport, wallet, phone. On a great blue screen he finds that his flight to Turin has changed terminals. Why, he wonders, are there no clocks in airports? He passes through miles of leather handbags and perfumes and whiskies, miles of Beautiful German and Turkish retail maids. And in this dream he is talking to them about colognes and letting them giggle and spritz him with scents of leather and musk. He is looking through wallets and fingering one made of ostrich leather. He is standing at the counter of a VIP lounge and talking to the receptionist, a lady with sea urchin hair, about his childhood in Delaware, charming his way into the lounge where businessmen of all nationalities are wearing the same suit. He sits in a cream leather chair, drinks champagne, eats oysters. And there the dream fades. He awakens in a bus heading somewhere. But where? Why is he holding so many bags? Why is there the tickle of champagne in his throat? Les tries to listen among the straphangers for Italian. He must find the flight to Turin. Around him seem to be American businessmen talking about sports. Les recognizes the words but not the names. He feels un American. He feels homosexual. Les notes that there are at least five men on the bus who are taller than himself, which seems like a life record. The shuttle crosses the tarmac and deposits them at an identical terminal nightmarishly. Passport control. Yes, he still has his in his front left pants pocket. Geschaft, he answers the muscular agent. Red hair cut so close it seemed painted on, secretly thinking, what I do is hardly business or pleasure. Security again. Shoes, belt off again. What was the logic here? Passport, customs. Security again. Again. Submitting to his bladder at last, Les enters a white tiled bathroom and sees in the mirror an old, balding uncle in wrinkled, oversized clothes. It turns out there is no mirror. It is a businessman across the sink. A Marx Brothers joke. Les washes his own face, not the businessman's, finds his gate, boards his plane. Passport, wallet, phone. He sinks into his window seat with a sigh and never gets his second breakfast. He falls instantly to sleep. Les awakens to a feeling of peace and triumph. Stiamo initiando la nostra di gessa verso turino. We are beginning our descent into Turin. He removes his eye mask and smiles at the Alps below, an optical illusion making them into craters and not mountains. And then he sees the city itself. The plane lands serenely and a woman in the front applauds. He recalls smoking on an airplane once when he was young. Checks his armrest and finds an ashtray in it, still charming or alarming. A chime rings. Passengers stand up. Passport, wallet, phone. Les has braved his way through the crisis. He no longer feels Mickeyed or dull. His bag is the first to arrive on the luggage roller coaster. A dog eager to greet its master. No passport control, just an exit. And here, wonderfully, a young man in an old man's mustache holding a sign lettered SREs. Les raises his hand and the man takes his luggage. Inside the sleek black car, Les finds that his driver speaks no English. Fantastico, he thinks as he closes his eyes again. Has he been to Italy before? He has, twice. Once when he was 12, on a trip with his family that took the path of a pachinko game, beginning in Rome, shooting up to London and falling back and forth between various countries until they landed at last back in Italy's slot of Rome. All he remembers in his childish exhaustion is the stone building stained as if hauled from the ocean, the heart stopping traffic, his father lugging old fashioned suitcases, including his mother's mysterious makeup kit across the cobblestones, and the nighttime click click click of the yellow window shade as it flirted with the Roman window. His mother, in her final years, often tried to coax other memories from Les sitting bedside. Don't you remember the landlady with the wig that kept falling off? The handsome waiter who offered to drive us to his mother's house for lasagna? The man at the Vatican who wanted to charge you for an adult ticket because you were so tall? His mother sitting there with her head wrapped in a scarf with white seashells on it? Yes, he said every time, just as he always did with his agent, pretending to have read books he had never even heard of, the Whig lasagna, the Vatican. The second time he went with Robert Brownburn. Yes, that Robert Brownburn, the famous poet whom Les met on a beach when he was 23 and Robert was into his 40s. It was in the middle of their time together when Les was finally worldly enough to be a help with travel and and Robert had not become so filled with bitterness that he was a hindrance. The time when a couple finds its balance and passion quiets from its early scream, but gratitude is still abundant. The moments that no one realizes are the golden years. Robert was in a rare mood for travel and had accepted an invitation to read at a literary festival. Rome in itself was enough, Robert said, but showing Rome to Les was like having the chance to introduce him to a beloved aunt. Whatever happened would be memorable. What they did not realize until they arrived was that the event was to take place in the ancient Forum, where thousands would gather in the summer wind to listen to a poet read before a crumbling arch. He would be standing on a dais lit by pink spotlights with an orchestra playing Philip Glass pieces between each poem I will never read anywhere like this again, robert whispered to Les as they stood off to the side. A brief biographical clip was projected for the audience on an enormous screen, starting with Robert as a boy in a cowboy costume and ending with the face recognizable from his Library of America photograph, hair gone gray and wild, retaining that monkey business expression of a capering mind. The music swelled. His name was called. 4,000 people applauded, and Robert in his gray silk suit, readied himself to stride onto a pink lit stage below the ruins of the centuries and let go of his lover's hand. Like someone falling from a cliff, Les opens his eyes to a countryside of autumn vineyards, endless rows of the crucified plants, a pink rose bush always planted at the end. He wonders why the hills roll to the horizon. Atop each hill a little town silhouetted with its single church spire and no visible means of approaching approach except with a rope and a pick. Les senses by the sun's shift that at least an hour has passed. He is not headed to Turin then. He is being taken somewhere else. Switzerland. Les understands at last what is happening. He is in the wrong car. Sres he anagrams in his mind what he took in his lingering hypnosis and pride for signor and a childlike misspelling of less Sriramataman S Strovinka Eskatarinovic Sres Sres Societa de la Repubblica Eropeana Perla Sessuelita, Delhi Studentesca. Almost anything makes sense to Less in his current state, but it is obvious. Having cleared the hurdles of travel, he let his guard slip, waved at the first sign resembling his name, and was whisked away to an unknown location. He knows life's commedia dell' arte and how he has been cast. He sighs in his seat, staring out at a shrine to an auto accident placed at a particularly rough curve in the road. He feels the Madonna's plastic eyes meet his for an instant, and now the signs for a particular town become more frequent and a particular hotel, something called the Mondolce Golf Resort. Les stiffens in fear. His narrating mind whittles the possibilities down. He has taken the car of a Dr. Ludwig S, some vacationing Austrian doctor who is off to a Piedmontese golf resort with his wife. Him, brown skulled with white hair in puffs over his ears, little steel glasses, red shorts and suspenders, Frau S cropped blond hair with a streak of pink rough cotton tunics and chili pepper leggings, walking sticks packed in their luggage for jaunts to the village. She has signed up for courses in Italian cooking, while he dreams of nine holes and nine morettis. And now they stand in some hotel lobby in Turin, shouting at the proprietor while a bellboy waits holding the elevator. Why did Les come a day early? There will be no one from the prize foundation to straighten out the misunderstanding. The poor s voices will echo emptily up to the lobby. Chandelier Benvenuto, a sign reads above the entrance. Al Mandolce Golf Resort. A glass box on a hill, a pool, golf holes all around echo, the driver announces as they pull in. The late afternoon sunlight flashes on the pool. Two beautiful young women emerge from the entryway's hall of mirrors, hands clasped. Les readies himself for full mortification, but life has pardoned him at the scaffold steps. Welcome, the tall one in the seahorse print dress says. To Italy and to your hotel, Mr. Les. We are greet you from the prize committee. The other finalists do not arrive until late the following day. So les has almost 24 hours in the golf resort by himself. Like a child. He swims and sits in the sauna. The cold plunge pool, the steam room, the cold plunge again until he is as scarlet as a fever victim. Freddy would find this amusing if he were here, just as Les himself once found Robert's exertions on the tennis court amusing. Unable to decipher the menu in the restaurant, a shimmering greenhouse where Les dines alone. For three meals, he orders something he recalls from a novel. Fasona, a tartar of local veal. For three meals he orders the same. Nebbiolos sits in the sunlit glass room like the last human on earth, with a wine cellar to last him a lifetime. Surely Freddy would find this amusing as well. There is an amphora of petunia like flowers on his private deck with worried day and night by little bees. On closer inspection, Les sees that instead of stingers, the creatures have long noses to probe the purple flowers. Not bees, hummingbird moths. The discovery delights him to his core. From his balcony at night, he watches the twinkling lights of the nearby townlet and, sitting above it like a judge, the dark outline of a monastery. Les pleasures are tainted only slightly the following afternoon, when a group of teenagers appears at the edge of the pool and stare as he does his laps. He returns to his room, all Swedish whitened wood, with a steel fireplace hanging on the wall. There is wood in the room, the seahorse lady said. You know how to light a fire? Yes. He stacks the wood in a little Cub Scout teepee. And stuffs the underspace with Corriere della Serra and lights the thing. Time for his rubber bands. Les has for years traveled with a set of rubber bands that he thinks of as his portable gym, multicolored with a set of interchangeable handles. He always imagines when he coils them into his luggage, how toned and fit he will be when he returns. The ambitious routine begins in earnest the first night of any journey, with dozens of special techniques recommended in the manual, which he lost long ago in Los Angeles but remembers in part. They involve wrapping the bands around the legs of beds, columns, and rafters and performing what the manual called lumberjacks, trophies, and action heroes. He ends his workout lacquered in sweat, feeling that he has beat back another day from time's assault. The second night he advises himself to let his muscles repair. The third, he begins the routine with half a heart as the thin walls of the room tremble with a neighbor's television. Les promises himself a better workout in a day or two. In return for this promise, a doll house whiskey from the room's dollhouse bar. And then the bands are forgotten, abandoned on the side table, a slain dragon. Les is no athlete. His single moment of greatness came one spring afternoon when he was 10 in the suburbs of Delaware. Spring meant not young love and damp flowers, but an ugly divorce from winter and a second marriage to Beth Bimbo. Summer. The steam room setting came on automatically in May. Cherry and plum blossoms turned the slightest wind into a ticker tape parade, and the air filled with pollen. Schoolteachers heard the boys giggling at the sweat shine of their bosoms. Young roller skaters found themselves stuck in softening asphalt. It was the year the cicadas returned. Les had not been alive when they buried themselves in the earth, but now they returned, tens of thousands of them, horrifying but harmless, drunk, driving through the air so that they bumped into heads and ears, encrusting telephone poles and parked cars with their delicate, amber hued, almost Egyptian, discarded shells. Girls wore them as earrings, boys, Tom Sawyer's descendants, trapped the live ones in paper bags and released them at study hour. At night the creatures hummed in huge choruses, the sound pulsing around the neighborhood, and school would not end until late June, if ever. Picture Young Les, 10 years old, in his first year of wearing the gold rimmed glasses that would return to him 30 years later when a Paris shopkeeper recommended a pair, and a thrill of sad recognition and shame coursed through his body. The tall boy in glasses in Wright Field, his hair as gold white as old ivory, covered now by a black and yellow baseball cap, wandering in the clover with a dreamy look in his eyes. Nothing has happened in right field all season, which is why he was put there, a kind of athletic Canada. His father, though Les would not know this for more than a decade, had to attend a meeting of the Public Public Athletics board to defend his son's right to participate in the softball league despite his clear lack of talent and his obliviousness on the field. His father actually had to remind his son's coach, who had recommended Les removal, that it was a public athletic league and like a public library, was open to all, even the fumbling oafs among us. And his mother, a softball champ in her day, has had to pretend that none of this matters to her at all and drives Les to games with a speech about sportsmanship that is more a dismantling of her own beliefs than a relief to the boy. Picture less with his leather glove weighing down, his left hand sweating in the spring heat, his mind lost in the reverie of his childhood lunacies before they give way to adolescent lunacies when an object appears in the sky, acting almost on species memory, he runs forward, the glove before him. The bright sun spangles his vision and thwack. The crowd is screaming. He looks into the glove and sees gloriously grass bruised and double stitched in red, the single catch of his lifespan from the stands, his mother's ecstatic cry from his bag in Piedmont the famous rubber bands uncoiled for the famous childhood hero from the room's doorway, the seahorse lady bursting in, opening windows to let out the smoke from Les botched attempt at a fire. Les has read in the packet the beautiful women handed to him before vanishing into the hotel's glasswork that while the five finalists for the prize were chosen by an elderly committee, the final jury is made up of 12 high school students. The second night they appear in the lobby dressed up in elegant flowered dresses, the girls or their dad's oversized blazers, the boys. Why did it not occur to Les that these were the same teens he'd seen by the pool? The teens move like a tour group into the greenhouse, formerly Les private dining rooms, which now bustles with waiters and unknown people. The beautiful Italian women reappear and introduce him to his fellow finalists. Les feels his confidence drop. The first is Ricardo, a young unshaven Italian man, incredibly tall and thin in sunglasses, jeans, and a T shirt that reveals Japanese carp tattoos on both arms. The other three are all much older. Luisa, glamorously white haired and dressed in a white linen dress with gold alien bracelets for fending off critics. Vittorio, a cartoon villain with streaks of white at his temples, a pencil mustache and black plastic spectacles that narrow his look of disapproval and a short rose gold gnome from Finland who asked to be called Harry, though the name on his books is something else entirely. Their prize entries, Les has told a Sicilian historical novel, a retelling of Rapunzel in modern day Russia, an 800 page novel about a man's last minute on his deathbed in Paris, and an imagined life of Saint Marjorie. Les cannot seem to match each work with its author. Did the young one write the deathbed novel or Rapunzel? Either seems likely. They are all so intellectual. Les knows at once he hasn't a chance. I read your book, louisa says, her left eye batting away a loose scrap of mascara while her right one stares straight into his heart. It took me to new places. I thought of Joyce in outer space. The fin seems to be brimming with mirth. The cartoon villain interjects he would not live long. I think Portrait of the Artist is a spaceman, the Finn says at last, and covers his mouth as he ticks away with silent laughter. I have not read it. But, the tattooed author says, moving restlessly, hands in pockets. The others wait for more, but that is all. Behind them, Les recognizes Foster's lancet, walking alone into the room, very short and heavy headed and looking as soaked in misery as a trifle pudding is soaked in rum and perhaps also soaked in rum. I don't think I have a chance of winning, is all Les can say. The prize is a generous number of euros and a bespoke suit from Turin proper. Luisa flings a hand into the air. Oh, but who knows? It is up to these students. Who knows what they love? Romance. Murder. If it's murder, Vittorio has us beat. The villain raises first one eyebrow, then the other. When I was young, all I wanted to read was pretentious little books, Camus and Fournier and Calvino. If it had a plot. I hated it, he says. You remain this way, louisa chides, and he shrugs. Les senses a love affair from long ago. The two switch to Italian and begin what sounds like a squabble but could really be anything at all. Do any of you happen to speak English or have a cigarette? It is Lancet glowering under his eyebrows. The tattooed writer immediately pulls a pack from his jeans and produces one. Slightly flattened lancet, eyes it with trepidation, then takes it. You are the finalists? He asks. Yes, les says. And Lancet turns his head, alert to an American accent. His eyelids flutter closed in disgust. These things are not cool. I guess you've been to a lot of them. Les hears himself saying this inane not many. And I've never won. It's a sad little cockfight they arrange because they have no talent themselves. You have won. You won the main prize here. Foster's lancet stares at Les for a moment, then rolls his eyes and stalks off to smoke. For the next two days the crowd moves in packs, teenagers, finalists, elderly prize committee, smiling at one another as they stroll into the local village. The monastery is just as imposing by day, passing peacefully by one another at catered buffets, but never seated together, never interacting. Only Foster's lancet moves freely among them as the skulking lone wolf. Les now feels a new shame that the teenagers have seen him nearly naked and avoids the pool if they're present. In his mind he sees the horror of his middle aged body and cannot bear the judgment, when in fact his anxiety has kept him almost as lean as he was in his college years. He also shuns the spa, and so the old rubber bands are brought out again, and each morning Les gives his Lessian best to the trophies and action heroes of the long lost manual, each day doing fewer and fewer, asymptotically approaching but never reaching zero. Days, of course, are crowded. There is the sunny town square, lunch in al fresco, where less is cautioned not once, not twice, but 10 times by various Italians to apply sunscreen to his pinkening face. Of course he has applied sunscreen, and what the hell do they know about it with their luscious mahogany skin? There is the speech by Foster's Lancet on Ezra Pound, in the middle of which Lancet pulls out an electronic cigarette and begins to puff away its little green light. At this time, alien to the Piedmontese, makes some journalists present conjecture that that he is smoking their local marijuana. There are numerous baffling interviews. I am sorry, I need the interpreter. I cannot understand your American accent. In which dowdy matrons in lavender linen ask highly intellectual questions about Homer, Joyce and quantum physics, less completely below the journalistic radar in America and unused to substantive quote, sticks to a fiercely merrymaking Persona at all times refusing to wax philosophical on subjects he chose to write about precisely because he does not understand them. The ladies leave amused, but with insufficient copy for a column. From across the lobby Les hears journalists laughing at something Vittorio is saying. Clearly he knows how to handle these things. And there is the two hour bus ride up a mountain. When Les turns to Luisa with a question and she explains that the roses at the ends of the vineyard rows are to detect parasites, she shakes her finger and says the roses will be eaten first, like a bird. What is the bird? A canary in a coal mine? Es sato. Or like a poet in a Latin American country? Less offers the new regime always kills them. First the complex triple take of her expression, first astonishment, then wicked complicity, and finally shame for either the dead poets themselves or both. And then there is the prize ceremony itself. Les was in the apartment when Robert received the call back in 1992. Well, holy fuck. Came the cry from the bedroom, and Les rushed in, thinking Robert had injured himself. He carried on a dangerous intrigue with the physical world, and chairs, tables, shoes, all came rushing into his path as if to an electromagnet. But finding him basset faced, phone in his lap in a T shirt, his tortoiseshell glasses on his forehead, the newspaper spread around him, a cigarette dangerously close to lighting it, Robert turned to face Les. It was the Pulitzer committee, he said evenly. It turns out I've been pronouncing it wrong all these years. You won. It's not Pulitzer. It's Pulitzer. Robert's eyes took a survey of the room. Holy fuck, Arthur, I won. This ceremony takes place not in the ancient monastery itself, where one can buy honey produced by cloistered bees, but in a municipal hall built into the rock beneath the monastery. Being a place of worship, it lacked a dungeon, so the region of Piedmont has built one in the auditorium whose rear access door is open to the weather, a sudden storm brewing. The teenagers are arrayed exactly as Les imagines the hidden monks to be, with devout expressions and vows of silence. The elderly chair people sit at a kingly table. They also do not speak. The only speaker is a handsome Italian, the mayor, it turns out, whose appearance on the podium is announced by a crack of thunder. The sound fails on his microphone. The lights go out. The audience says, ah. Les hears the tattooed writer seated beside him in the darkness, lean over and speak to him at last. This is when someone is murdered. But who? Les whispers Foster's lancet before realizing that the famous Brit is seated behind them. The lights awake the room again and no one has been murdered. A movie screen begins to unroll noisily from the ceiling like a mad relative wandering downstairs and has to be sent back into hiding. The ceremony recommences, and as the mayor begins his speech in Italian, those mellifluous see sawing meaningless harpsichord words, Les feels his mind drifting away like a spaceman from an airlock, off into the asteroid belt of his own concerns, for he does not belong here. It seemed absurd when he got the invitation, but seen so abstractly and at such a remote distance in time and space, he accepted it as part of his getaway plan. But here, in his suit, sweat already beginning to dot the front of his white shirt and bead on his thinning hairline, he knows that it is utterly wrong. He did not take the wrong car. The wrong car took him. For he has come to understand that this is not a strange, funny Italian prize, a joke to tell his friends. It is very real. The elderly judges in their jewelry, the teens in their jury box, the finalists all quivering and angry with expectation. Even Foster's lancet, who has come all this way and written a long speech and charged his electronic cigarette and his dwindling battery of small talk. It is very real, very important to them. It cannot be dismissed as a lark. Instead, it is a vast mistake. Les begins to imagine, as the mayor doodles on in Italian, that he has been mistranslated, or what is the word? Super, translated his novel, given to an unacknowledged genius of a poet, Giuliana Cennino is her name, who worked his mediocre English into breathtaking Italian. His book was ignored in America, barely reviewed without a single interview request by a journalist. His publicist said autumn is a bad time, but here in Italy he understands he is taken seriously in autumn, no less. Just this morning he was shown the articles in La Repubblica, Corriere della Serra, local papers and Catholic papers with photographs of him in his blue suit, gazing upward at the camera with the same worried, unsophisticated sapphire gaze he showed to Robert on the beach when they met, the same gaze he showed to Freddy on their last morning together. But it should be a photograph of Juliana Cennino. She has written this book rewritten, upwritten, outwritten les himself, for he has known genius. He has been awakened by genius in the middle of the night, by the sound of genius pacing the halls. He has made genius his coffee and his breakfast fist and his ham sandwich and his tea. He has been naked with genius coaxed genius from panic, wrought genius pants from the tailor and ironed his shirts for reading. He has felt every inch of genius skin. He has known genius smell and felt genius touch Foster's lancet, a night's move away, for whom an hour long talk on Ezra Pound is a simple matter. He is a genius, Vittorio in his oil can, hairy mustache the elegant Louisa, the perverted Finn, the tattooed Ricardo. Possible geniuses. How has it come to this? What? God has enough free time to arrange this very special humiliation? To fly a minor novelist across the world so that he can feel in some seventh sense, the the minisculitude of his own worth decided by high school students? In fact, is there a bucket of blood hanging high in the auditorium rafters waiting to be dropped on his bright blue suit? It is a mistake, or a setup, or both, but there is no escaping it now. And further. You think it's love, Arthur. It isn't love. Robert Ranting in their hotel room before the lunchtime Pulitzer ceremony in New York, tall and lean as the day they met, gone gray of course, his face worn with age. I'm dog eared as a book, but still the figure of elegance and intellectual fury standing there in silver hair before the bright window. Prizes aren't love because people who never met you can't love you. The slots for winners are already set. From here until Judgment Day. They know the kind of poet who's going to win, and if you happen to fit the slot, then bully for you. It's like fitting a hand me down suit. It's luck, not love. Not that it isn't nice to have luck. Maybe the only way to think about it is being at the center of all beauty. Just by chance. Today we get to be at the center of all beauty. It doesn't mean I don't want it. It's a desperate way to get off. But I do. I'm a narcissist. Desperate is what we do. Getting off is what we do. You look handsome in your suit. I don't know why you're shacked up with a man in his 50s. Oh, I know you like a finished product. You don't want to add a pearl. Let's have champagne before we go. I know it's noon. I need you to do my bow tie. I forget how because I know you'll never forget. Prizes aren't love, but this is love. What Frank wrote It's a summer day and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world. More. Thunder unsettles Less from his thoughts. But it isn't thunder. It is applause. And the young writer is pulling at Les coat sleeve for Arthur Less has won.