Less Is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer

Author:Andrew Sean Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2022-09-20T00:00:00+00:00

And what of Dolly? Less, bereft of Tomboy, has turned to her for solace. He realizes she has been parted from her one true love (like so many of us), and so he makes her comfortable each night in bed, imagining how she must be suffering. But let me tell you something (and don’t tell a soul): She is not suffering. Not at all. Her grunts and sighs, her haughty mien, seem unchanged after Mandern’s absence. Is she a songbird who sings for any crowd? Is she truly heartless? Or are her passions more like Less’s than he imagines?

Each night, when the big-top tent has been lifted, the curtains all drawn, and one sole reading light shines upon the bedclothes, her performance begins. Standing on her little bed, taking the corner of her filthy bath towel, Dolly enacts a danse Apache. One imagines a score by Offenbach as she first coaxes the towel into the figure of her beloved and then tosses it across the stage, only to retrieve and abuse it some more, sometimes lovingly, sometimes viciously, until at last she has created the shape she desires and lies down, satisfied, upon her conquered beau. Less watches this display with interest; he recognizes it. The seemingly pointless struggle with the inanimate, the cries of anger and frustration, the sobs of love, to create something held only in the mind of its creator, who looks upon it with a sigh, delighting in what she has built, and falls asleep in a world where one thing is just as she would make it. Our protagonist looks down on her with envy, this creature so like himself, recognizing in her (though more successful in her chosen field) a fellow artist.

As for his own work, Less has written nothing. It is, he tells himself, the fallow year after finishing a book. A year to read, to choose the winner of a literary Prize. And yet, every evening as Dolly performs her danse Apache before settling in, he has picked up one book after another and failed to vanish into the pages. Grown too old for Neverland, our Peter Pan? Too stout for a rabbit hole? Could be (and what will he tell the Prize Committee?), but I propose the opposite: Less has come alive to his senses, his curiosity, his fears, his memory, and entered that separate realm of being in which the outer world does not vanish, not at all, but pricks with painful detail, the province not of the reader or the critic but of that suffering creature trapped behind the looking glass: the writer.

For now Less is paying attention.

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