'I wrote it for myself': Andrew Sean Greer on the Pulitzer-winning novel Less
A swirling grey fog has the entire San Francisco skyline in its dampening grasp as my taxi inches its way in heavy traffic across the city towards Andrew Sean Greer's home in Lower Haight. The Golden Gate Bridge's fabled towers, so cleverly painted a rust colour in 1937 to stand out in the blanketing mist, are far behind me now as I pass a snub-nosed cable car clanking down an adjacent road as steep as Everest.
It was during one of these frigid dips that Greer had a career master stroke, resolving to rewrite the draft of his melancholic novel about a failing, middle-aged writer and recast it into a globetrotting comedy about a failing, middle-aged writer.is the first comic novel in years to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and a stark departure from Greer's earlier, more serious novels. Few novelists are rewarded with bestsellers and rave reviews; fewer still make cultural waves.
Greer is gay, while his identical twin is straight, which I jokingly suggest demolishes gay gene theory. "People ask me about that all the time," says a smiling Greer. "It doesn't surprise me at all: it's a sibling relationship, not a scientific one. We're identical; it just so happens Michael likes women and I like men. And we both love musical theatre.
, over which he toiled for nearly three years, received rapturous reviews when it was published in 2003. "Are you sitting down?" Greer's agent asked him before reading a review by literary giant John Updike inIt was what happened next that almost broke his heart. Neither Greer, nor his agent, had heard of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story,, about a man who is born old and gets younger with each day for the rest of his life.
Dodging small piles of snow glistening in the coach lights, I look down the short Patchin Place streetscape, which has remained virtually unchanged since the 1850s. Ghosts linger here like steam rising up from its street vents. At number four is a plaque embossed with the name e e cummings , "an author of pictures, a draughtsman of words", who lived here for the last 40 years of his life.
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