What do you do when the love of your life is marrying someone else and you're about to turn fifty and your career feels like a long, slow deflation? Apparently, you flee. You accept every mediocre literary invitation on three continents and you run.
I was up at 2 AM finishing this one. Not because I couldn't sleep - I mean, I couldn't, but that's beside the point. I'd been working on a rebrand for a mezcal company all day, and I left Less playing while I cleaned my brushes and wiped down my desk and fed Frida and Diego their overpriced wet food. And then I just... didn't turn it off. I sat on my kitchen floor with my back against the cabinet and let Robert Petkoff walk me through Arthur Less's messy, beautiful, heartbreaking attempt to outrun his own grief.
A Man Who Can't Stop Apologizing for Existing
Arthur Less is not your typical literary protagonist. He's a middle-aged gay man who is, by most external measures, kind of a disaster. His novels get lukewarm reviews. He's too tall, too blond, too earnest. He apologizes constantly - for his writing, for his presence, for taking up space. And the thing that wrecked me? That felt so specific and so sharp? It's that Less doesn't think he deserves the great love story of his life. He had it. He thinks he ruined it. So he keeps shrinking himself smaller and smaller.
Greer writes Less with this devastating tenderness that sneaks up on you. The prose is funny - genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny - and then it'll pivot to something so lonely and precise that your throat closes. There's a moment where Less is in Morocco, completely out of his depth, sunburned and confused, and the narration pulls back to show us his memory of his ex-lover Freddy - just this small, quiet domestic moment - and I had to pause the audio because my chest physically hurt.
My abuela would have loved this one. She would've called Arthur Less a "pobrecito" and meant it with her whole heart. She understood that kind of love - the kind where you're too proud and too scared to reach for what's right in front of you.
Robert Petkoff Understands the Assignment
Okay. Robert Petkoff. This man. His voice has this warmth that sits right in the center of his register - not too low, not performative, just... present. What got me was his timing. Comedy in audiobooks is SO hard to land because you can't control the listener's pace, but Petkoff has this instinct for the pause before the punchline. Less's bumbling through a German literary panel? The way Petkoff shifts into this slightly stiff, overly formal tone for the German characters versus Less's apologetic American softness? Chef's kiss. You can hear the class dynamics, the cultural awkwardness, the way Less is always slightly outside every room he enters.
And then - and this is where he really earns it - the emotional moments. When the narrative voice reveals something about who's actually telling this story (I won't spoil it, but if you know, you KNOW), Petkoff's delivery shifts so subtly that you almost don't catch it the first time. I went back and relistened to the last twenty minutes twice. The reveal recontextualizes everything. His voice cracks open just enough to let the ache through without going melodramatic.
I listened at 1.0x. Don't you dare speed this up. Greer's sentences are built like little architectural marvels and Petkoff knows exactly how much weight each one needs.
The Booktrack Thing - Let's Talk About It
So this is the Booktrack Edition, which means there's background music woven into the narration. I was skeptical - I usually hate anything that gets between me and the narrator's voice. But honestly? It's gentle enough that I forgot about it for long stretches. During the travel sequences it adds this wistful, almost cinematic quality. During quieter emotional beats it pulls back. It never competed with Petkoff, which is the only thing that matters. That said, if you're someone who finds ANY background noise distracting, get the standard edition. The narration is identical.
Who This Book Is Really For (And Who Should Maybe Skip)
This is a rainy Sunday book. This is for people who've ever felt like they peaked too early or too late or not at all. It's for anyone who's loved someone so much they convinced themselves they didn't deserve it. It's for my fellow ugly-criers who want something that's also wickedly funny - I laughed and cried sometimes in the same chapter, which is a rare and disorienting gift.
If you need fast pacing or a tight plot, this will frustrate you. The structure is episodic - Less bounces from country to country and some stretches feel more like vignettes than a building narrative. A couple of the middle travel sections drift. But I think that looseness is the point. Less is drifting. You're supposed to feel it.
If you've ever dismissed literary fiction as cold or pretentious, let this one change your mind. It's warm. It's so warm. Though I'll say the warmth here is a different animal than something like Valley of Horses, which I reviewed last year and which earns its emotional weight through sheer epic scale rather than this kind of quiet, intimate accumulation.
My Heart Won't Recover and I Don't Want It To
I ugly-cried twice. Once during that Morocco memory flashback. Once at the ending, which I won't describe except to say: it's a love story. Greer promised us that on the first page. He delivered. And Robert Petkoff's voice carried it home like something precious and breakable.
Four stars because a couple of those middle chapters lose momentum. But that ending? That ending is a five. My heart. MY HEART.
