New(ish) Books

Andrew Sean Greer's Less and Nona Willis Aronowitz's Bad Sex

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing the book reviews for this week - as usual, fiction paired with non-fiction. These are a bit different from standard book reviews. I tend to skip over plot summary and sort of assume that the reader already has familiarity with the book. The ‘higher purpose’ here is to be writer-centric not reader-centric, and even for a book that I hated reading (like Bad Sex), the idea is to engage with it on the writer’s terms, to try to really enter into the writer’s world and to think through what the writer is truly trying to say.

Best,

Sam

ANDREW SEAN GREER’s Less (2017)

I somehow missed Less when it came out, and enchanted everybody, and I’m violating my intention-at-the-moment of reading recent books only so that I can catch up on Less and better participate in the great cultural jubilee of Less Is Lost. And for the best. Less is the best book I’ve read in a long time, one of these books that’s too wonderful to say anything much about. 

It’s simultaneously both a great gay book and a great travel book - as well as, most trenchantly, a great book about aging, about what exactly you do with yourself when it becomes clear that there’s nothing much to look forward to.

Arthur Less in free flow/freefall

The first narrative touchstone of Less is to connect homosexuality with aging. If there are no children - no inter-generational transmission - then life becomes more or less just the process of growing older, and of taking one’s pleasure as one can. Less’ life arc has been to be the younger man getting picked up by older men and then, at some stage, to be the older man picking up younger men; and then, abruptly, his younger boyfriend marries somebody else and Less has nothing for himself except some talks, some food articles, the novel that he seems increasingly unlikely to ever write. It’s a bracing vision of an entire way of life - of a credo of living for the moment, living insouciantly, letting age happen when it happens as opposed to doing what most people do and sacrificing one’s youth in the effort to be comfortable in old age. Less’ way of being has no shortage of beauty in it but is also excruciating, and this sense of unmooring, of having everything in one’s experience get washed away without a trace, is repeated for Less in three different iterations. There is the dissolution of the ‘Russian River School,’ of which Less serves as a ‘witness’ and as one of the last remaining links - “A 1970s bohemian world long receded over the horizon….writers drinking and smoking and fucking into their 40s….proud bloated middle-aged artists who rolled in the river like sea lions” - but which was doomed from the beginning, the last remaining survivors now bed-confined and emphysema-ridden. And then there’s the generation that Less arrives on the tail end of - proudly out, wildly promiscuous, and obliterated by AIDS. Less’ existence is understood (as part of the novel’s more subtle subtext) to be a stand-in for this lost generation - “He had never seen a gay man age past fifty, none except Robert” - and Less acquires a certain moral responsibility, on behalf of the generation lost to AIDS, to figure out just how to age gracefully, whether it’s best to remain forever insouciant as a way of turning himself into a sort of living memorial or if it’s better to adapt to changing politics, get married, be domestic. And then, more personally, there’s the set of habits that become one’s compromise in life, that aren’t exactly fulfilling but become the cornerstones of identity - the blue suit, the easy promiscuity, the not-quite-relationship with the guy who’s “always at your place” - which then, just at the moment one needs to fall back on their familiarity, become suddenly unavailable. There’s no ability to pass the hard questions forward to family, to the next generation; for Less, aging is more acute and more terminal; he needs to figure everything out for himself.

The next narrative touchstone is a meditation on genius and mediocrity. Robert’s solution - as the pioneering gay man past fifty - is to dedicate himself completely to genius. And Less has to admire this strategy - it has made Robert immortal - but it also made for a miserable existence, “habit the demon pet in the house,” “the suffering, suffering, suffering,” the slammed doors, the constant doubt, and, as a lifestyle, is not for everyone. “Less has known genius, knows what genius can do,” he finds himself thinking at one point, “but what if you are not a genius what will the work do then?” A challenge is posed for Less early in his journey; like a bridgekeeper setting a riddle, his host in Mexico asks him, “What is it like to go on, knowing you are not a genius, knowing you are a mediocrity? I think it’s the worst kind of hell.” It’s a withering condemnation, of course, but it turns out to be less trenchant than it might be. Less starts to reply, “Well, I think there’s something between a genius and a mediocrity - ” and the rest of the novel can be read as a sort of continuation of Less’ unfinished statement. He is not genius and not mediocre; he is pursuing a very particular path, call it beautiful music in a minor key, and it’s very much Greer’s mission, to which the various characters in Less tend to be riveted spectators, to make the case that a life like Less’, fitful, ambivalent, without a particularly obvious trajectory, is also majestic.

Andrew Sean Greer in a Lessian state of mind

The next touchstone is the curious dance between the narrator and Less. This is resolved beautifully in the novel’s concluding pages - about as breathtaking a reveal as I’ve encountered in fiction - but, for the bulk of Less, it’s hard to figure out what’s going on. The sense is of a higher angel standing over Less and hyper-alert to all of his little slips: the watch set disastrously to the wrong timezone; the actual wise words that Robert said many years ago, of which Less has remembered the exact opposite; or (most hilariously of all) the scrupulously rendered translation of what Less has, unfortunately, just said in German. The narrative engine of the plot is largely this incessant remonstration between Less and Higher Angel - so consistently funny that I had to be careful about reading Less in public places, it always posed the risk of making me laugh uncontrollably; and at the same time so true to the experience of travel, to the way in which travel is mostly a never-ending sequence of blunders, and in which travel (contrary to the usual travel narrative in which a person goes to a foreign place to find themselves) is really about losing yourself, about sort of stripping yourself bare through the sequence of mishaps and eventually reaching a place of vulnerability where it becomes possible to deal honestly with whatever it was that one left behind. What’s slightly confusing about the narrative technique - although Greer never loses control - is the way in which the narration flits back and forth between the Higher Angel and Less’ own mental bumblings. This secondary technique of dual-controlled narration can be as funny as the conceit of the Higher Angel standing over Less with the correct translation, correct memory, correct time zone; when Greer is in dual-control mode, everything is expressed as a confabulatory panic, Less in a taxi ride that’s taking a bit too long and duly assuming that he’s been mistaken for an Austrian doctor traveling to Switzerland for a golf holiday, Less dropped off by speedboat on an island and putting two and two together immediately concluding that his ex-boyfriend’s malevolent father has decided to maroon him. But, hilarious as this is, it makes for a rare weak point in the novel’s structure - that we’re not completely sure where Less ends and the narrator begins, and, as a result, Less’ character is surprisingly less-defined than it might be. Greer seems to be attuned to this issue and adds a number of passages (one senses an editor’s intervention) that are meant to make his character more full-bodied, to give a sense of what it really is to be ‘Lessian.’ But I sort of regret this latter-draft over-concern. Greer seems to be most comfortable dealing with Less in two dimensions, as a cipher in a blue suit, an eternal innocent beset by heartbreak, and is less sure of himself when depicting Less as an actually-very-intelligent, very-adept-adult, who can fully hold his own in any repartee, even with certified geniuses.

What I suspect is that Greer got caught slightly between iterations of the character - Less as Passpartout or Candide and then Less as more of an Alan Hollinghurst sort of character, fully self-conscious, with a self-sufficient gravitas. But if intensive rewriting or re-conceptualizing made Less’ characterization a bit muddy, the obvious re-thinking and re-working that comprises Greer’s writing process paid dividends in other ways. Late in Less, Greer describes his protagonist’s breakthrough in his own much-stalled novel: “It is like pouring water from an old leaking bucket into a shining new one: it feels almost suspiciously easy. He simply takes a gloomy event in the plot and inverts it…degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining. What sport! If only one could do this with life!” And, since it’s an iron law of contemporary fiction that any time a writer depicts a character writing the writer is of course depicting their own process, it seems safe to assume that we’re getting a glimpse into the blueprinting of Less, Greer wondering how to make compelling his underlying narrative (“a white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows”) and realizing that the solution is to make it giddily buoyant and really, really funny. Greer continues re Less’ book: “Somehow a bittersweet longing starts to appear in the novel that was never there before. It changes, grows kinder. Less, as with a repentant worshipper, begins again to love his subject, and at last….our benevolent god grants his character the brief benediction of joy.” 

It’s hard to think of a work of art more life-affirming than Less - more determined to reach into a somewhat sad, non-descript life, lonely, ‘mediocre,’ in so many ways unfulfilled, and to suffuse it with love, to insist that Less is ‘brave,’ ‘lucky,’ glorious, that everything that matters to Arthur Less should matter to a reader as well. For me - more parochially - there’s something in Less that’s incredibly affirming, redeeming, as well, of the state of publishing and of contemporary fiction. I spend so much time railing about the publishing industry, about trends in literature, but Less makes the case, miraculously, that all is right with the system after all. Greer clearly went through massive rewrites, pitched himself to the market, found his niche and voice in all the ways that the writing programs and the industry gatekeepers tell you to do - and produced a genuine masterpiece and was duly rewarded for it. The feeling by the time we get to the end of Less’ journey is the same feeling inhabited by Arthur Less - that the various anxieties (“I think it’s the worst kind of hell”) really aren’t so terrible at all, that, come to think of it, Less, as another character observes, “has the best life of anyone I know,” and that the world is strange and vast and wonderful and really, really silly, and that we live in an extraordinary time, and have the ability to live extraordinary lives of incomparable freedom and whimsicality that our ancestors could barely even envision, hallelujah, shantih shantih, priase be, amen. 

NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ’s Bad Sex (2022)

This is a really terrible book - the overshare from hell - but that’s not to say that it isn’t thought-provoking; doesn’t touch on interesting subject matter. 

For me, the overriding experience from Bad Sex - and this, actually, is surprisingly rare - is of deeply, truly disliking the author of the book I’m reading. Willis Aronowitz has a lot going for her. She’s smart, is relentlessly honest about her personal experience, is in pursuit of important, zeitgeisty truths, but she’s also entitled, proud of being entitled, ruthlessly critical towards everybody around her while always giving herself a free pass, and jaw-droppingly oblivious to the almost perfect hypocrisy of her own behavior.

It’s usually a bad sign in a book when a writer starts reporting how much their stories make their friends’ eyes roll - and there are red flags abundant for Willis Aronowitz here, e.g. the friend cutting her off when she’s about to launch into another tale of her sexcapades by saying, “Listen I got four hours of sleep last night I just can’t do this” - but Willis Aronowitz is so sure of the rightness of her cause, the categorical imperative to share all possible details of her sex life, to be as unvarnished as possible, that she plows right past any attempt, even by her own interlocutors and interviewees, to rein it in. 

The issue is that Willis Aronowitz is an ideologue. Her world view reduces to believing that “The war is between patriarchy and every human under its spell.” Sex and love become subsets of political right-thinking, and the mission of Bad Sex is to get all the messiness of sex neatly aligned under a satisfactory political rubric - “a tall order,” as Willis Aronowitz admits before she forthrightly sets to her task. The roots of Willis Aronowitz’s conviction, as she articulates it, stem from the desultory experience of seeing other kids in her high school fall in love and do unspeakable things like “gift each other with corny teddy bears.” The awfulness of that - “there was something that sincerely irked me about traditional hand-holding coupledom” - sparked Willis Aronowitz’s radicalism. Casual hookups were no good, romance was no good. “There didn’t seem to be a good answer,” Willis Aronowitz writes despairingly - and so she dedicates herself to exploring the gamut of sexuality (promiscuity, celibacy, marriage, polyamory, homosexuality, you name it) but always, in theory at least, in service of the underlying political objective, reconciling the need to be unstintingly feminist with the need to be unstintingly loyal to one’s own sex drive.

Nona Willis Aronowitz - sincerely irked

In practice, what Willis Aronowitz’s political crusade seems to result in is a license to be really mean to everybody around her - and to document her most unpleasant judgments of them for all posterity. We learn not only a great deal about how bad her ex-husband is in bed but also her concerns that he’s not smart enough for her (and no matter that he seems, per her account, to have been a remarkably loving, patient partner). For any of her casual hook-ups, we are treated not only to the description of their anatomy and prowess but to her concerns about their job prospects and capacity to pay their rent. If people whom she ostensibly loves are suffering - let’s say her ex-husband getting four surgeries - there’s a good chance that he might be described as “actively in pain, which turned him into a touchy, impatient asshole.” If anybody in her life evinces the least bit of feminist non-perfection, they will tend to be whisked into the narrative for a reprimand - for instance, Willis Aronowitz’s father, otherwise absent from Bad Sex, who makes an appearance for the observation that, in spite of being “one of the few people in history who managed to substantially self-improve” he could, alas, never be completely “cleansed of certain sexist impulses.” 

And these are the people she cares about. Her M.O. out in the world appears to be to judge everybody harshly and preemptively off extraordinarily slender demographic data and then to be shocked - shocked! - when they turn out to be more complicated than the box she had summarily put them in. Of a boyfriend, she remarks as great high praise, “As I got to know him I realized he was not a normie at all but one of the most unusual people I had ever met” - which sounds generous, although the only apparent reasons she had for assuming that he was a ‘normie’ were that he sometimes went to church and lived in New Jersey. Worse, of course, is when people hit one of her invisible feminist tripwires. The episode of an unplanned pregnancy turns out to be an ideal opportunity to assess the revolutionary zeal of her friend group - and, with satisfaction, Willis Aronowitz notes a friend’s inadvertent flicker of “surprise or discomfort” as Willis Aronowitz “complains about first-trimester symptoms over martinis.” 

On this score, Willis Aronowitz’s hypocrisy turns out to be really staggering. She speculates on why she didn’t get “more respect than I got from the garden-variety fuck boys” she was seeing in college. (Um, I don’t know, maybe at a guess because she thought of them as ‘garden-variety fuck boys.’) She is quicker than anyone to call out misogyny even when, in the case of her father, carefully concealed under a life-long commitment to feminism, but, if anything, laments that she is not more committed to a program of political man-hating - love, she frets, “mucks up the justifiable anger women feel towards men.” And, not so surprisingly, the great Kenny Powers-ish criticism she has of herself is that she is just too generous, too giving. Of her experience of (briefly) looking after her aging father and invalid husband, she writes, “I felt a million years old, mobbed by needy dependents. Through the cumulus clouds of other people’s needs I couldn’t yet clearly see my own.”

And on it goes from there. But, as generally despicable as I found Bad Sex to be, it is engrossing - and not, actually, for all the voyeurism. Willis Aronowitz is dealing with the kinds of questions that really are on people’s minds and that they usually talk about in the sorts of door-is-locked, wine-rack-is-stocked conversations with close friends when they are confident of not being overheard. When she treats a 2015 Medium essay called ‘Against Chill’ as a cultural watershed, “a revelation, a drumbeat,” I actually get what she means - ‘chill’ had been a touchstone for my generation (which is also Willis Aronowitz’s generation), a completely sanctified, unquestioned sexual virtue, and it is actually a tremendous paradigm shift, even if it sounds silly to put it that way, to flip towards a model of dating rooted in ‘intensity.’ And same goes for the conversations on bisexuality, celibacy, polyamory. Willis Aronowitz’s confusion - which she is admirably open about - speaks to the confusion of our era, the sense that we have broken out of a specific mold for sex and relationships, that we have an array of thrilling new arrangements at our disposal (and a license to talk about them ad infinitum) but that it remains somehow just past our abilities to make any of them actually work.

To give Willis Aronowitz further credit, she has done her research - she assembles a startlingly disparate roster of feminist theoreticians across the ages, Mary Gove Nichols and the free love movement of the 1840s; Emma Goldman and her anarchist take on polyamory; the New York Radical Women of the late ’60s, which was the feminism entry-point for Willis Aronowitz’s mother, Ellen Willis; the celibacy advocates of the 1970s, now so left-behind-by-time that when Willis Aronowitz gets in touch with Dana Densmore, one of their more vocal proponents, Densmore insists, remarkably enough, that they were never really advocating for celibacy at all; and Laina Bey-Cheng, my favorite of the theoreticians, who manages to break apart the “virgin-slut continuum,” finds a new ‘axis’ in a “neo-liberal script of self-agency and independence,” which sounds obscure but, to me, describes perfectly the mentality of Samantha in Sex and the City, of a view of female sexuality that seemed to be taking over the society at the time I was growing up.

Free love pioneer Mary Gove Nichols

But somehow, amidst all the speculations on how to align sexual politics with sexual desire, Willis Aronowitz seems never to consider the possibility that they might not exactly be reconcilable. She actually does, to her surprise, comes across an ‘unusually pessimistic passage’ of her mother’s in which Ellen Willis argues exactly this: “Our most passionate convictions about sex do not necessarily reflect our real desires,” writes Willis. This is really astray from the politics-first view of sexuality that Willis Aronowitz espouses, and so she treats her mother’s perplexing statement as ‘pessimism’ or apocrypha, but here - I submit - mother knows best. Sex is a space that’s pre-political, politics follows from sex and not the other way around, and the reason that Willis Aronowitz never felt fully politically satisfied either from early ’00s hookup culture or from the ‘sincerely irksome’ teddy bears-gifters of her high school was that there never would be a satisfying political solution. Sexuality is too complicated for politics to work out. And the attempt to articulate a framework in which women are at perpetual war with patriarchy while men are expected to respond to all the exigencies of female libido is just not going to work; it’s like declaring a war and declaring at the same time that the other side is not allowed to fight back.

Ellen Willis knows best

And, at some level, Willis Aronowitz does seem to get that what she’s advocating for doesn’t make sense. Over and over again, she ties herself into ideological knots and is frustrated that she’s doing so. It concerns her greatly, for instance - “here came another thing to worry about” is how she puts it - that she sometimes becomes unfeministly aroused by her partner’s arousal. She falls in love and has to chide herself for her loss of revolutionary discipline: “Love. A depressingly effective force against political ideology,” she writes. “Second wave feminists were well aware that heterosexual romance presented a major roadblock to political clarity.” And even lesbianism - the most obviously promising, most ideological consistent method to combine the pursuit of feminism with the pursuit of libido - turns out to be suspect as well. To abandon heterosexuality altogether is, she writes, “to mute the rallying cries of revolution.” From her self-description in the section on lesbianism, it sounds like Willis Aronowitz simply was more sexually attracted to men than women, but, not surprisingly, that’s not the gloss she gives it. She quotes the writer Asa Seresin saying “To be permanently, preemptively disappointed in heterosexuality is to refuse the possibility of changing straight culture for the better.” So, for the sake of revolution, Willis Aronowitz concludes, back to the Tinder men she so despises - but this time with gusto. “I would have to stop feeling sheepish and inert,” she writes. 

Well, it’s anybody guess how extensive the cognitive dissonance is here - if Willis Aronowitz really believes that that next round of Tindering, this time with re-upped ideology, actually advances the cause; or if she knows that she’s kidding herself. For me, though, the lesson is really clear - that it’s not a great idea to pass off one’s sex diary as sociology or political theory. It is a confusing time for figuring out sex and relationships (although is it ever not?) and it’s not surprising that Willis Aronowitz finds herself muddling through it. I don’t mind the chaos of her narrative; I do mind that she thinks she can solve all of it with just the right political formula.