I liked this book both more and less than I expected, somehow! I thought it would be more of an outright comedy - think Hitchhiker's Guide - but it was more lighthearted and amusing than laugh out loud funny. The tone was much more reflective than I expected. Honestly, it felt like a very gentle satirization of contemporary literature - I felt like it both had a lot of love for the genre, while also pointing out the many ways it can be elitist, privileged, and out of touch. 

And, for my recurring section: Do they bury their gays?

no. The main character does not die, and there are many other queer characters who do not die. A lot of relationships do end, some more sadly than others, but none are outright tragic, and there are interesting reflections on queer happiness and love throughout. Neither primary romance of the story ends in tragedy or death.

not mad that I read it but would not re-read. lots of wisdom, compassion and insight from the author. highbrow eat pray love with very little time for developing any characters beyond the main character, who sadly was not as endearing to me as the author hoped. prose is beautiful but often overdone. the whole thing ends up being very very meta and actually the final third does pull it off, but that couldn’t stop the first half from feeling like a gentle little drag. still nice to see happy books win prizes.

parts of this were lovely but i feel like it wasn’t everything i wanted from the premise…also should have expected that a book about a white man travelling the world would feel a lil orientalismy at times lol? like not outright but idk sometimes i just felt weird abt it! fun prose but it could be boring at times and so it took me a long time to finish 

This is getting a one star review because it is a book, and I did, in fact, finish reading it (due to peer pressure). This book is awful. The main character is deeply unlikeable, does not grow, and thinks his life is awful, even though it isn’t. The level of detail is absurd and unnecessary, making this book about four times longer than it needs to be. It’s poorly written and thinks too highly of itself. It feels homophobic, despite being written by a gay man. It’s racist, sexist, classist, ableist, and fatphobic. I don’t know what the Pulitzer Prize people were on, but unless you have some, don’t read this. 

Update: I went back to change the rating from 3.75 to 3.25 since there were so many things from this book that doesn't sit well with me.

If I had to describe this book in a single blurb, it would be this: Less is a better-written Eat, Pray, Love that explores the mid-life crisis of a heartbroken gay man who struggles to grapple with his age and relative mediocrity as a writer. 

This book was sold to me as exploring a “new gay identity,” and I was thoroughly disappointed to find I’d be reading a main character who was a white cis middle-aged gay man with enough financial security to travel the world. While I understand gay identity hasn’t had very much time to explore life after 50 due to the AIDS crisis, this is the kind of queer demographic we already see in media. There is nothing new about the story of Arthur Less. 

That said, this book is beautifully written, and the characters are—for the most part—quite charming. The few qualms I did have with the characters and the narration I would attribute to the author instead: inclusion of historic events as jokes in poor taste, a colonist mindset that seeps into place or people or cultural descriptions, the sexualization of a literal three-year-old girl by calling her a “temptress.” Miscommunication is also overused as a plot device in this novel, and the ending proved frustrating to me for this reason. The depiction of relationships overall felt very messy to me—some in endearing ways, and others not. 

I think my biggest qualm with this novel is that it continues to normalize large age gaps within gay relationships. Though it did add to some of the drama, these age gaps were entirely unnecessary to the grand scheme of the plot, in my opinion, and contributed to the feeling that this book is in general outdated. Age gaps feel a less acceptable now than they were years ago, which is why it continuously frustrated me to see this book—published in 2017! —continue the old narratives of gay relationships and representation. I think this was the kind of novel that would have been much more fitting of a time period in the 90s or even early 2000s, as opposed to 2017. The few attempts at digging into discourse that would’ve made the novel feel more contemporary went unresolved and were largely unsatisfying. Nothing about this book shook my way of being. 

The second major flaw in this book was that it was clearly trying to be funny (an interview with the author revealed the story was originally much darker before he added some lighter elements and twisted it into a so-called comedy), but the humor almost always fell flat for me. It relied heavily on humiliation and irony (much like Arthur Less’s own attempts at fixing his novel in the last few chapters of the book), but an ironic book isn’t necessarily a funny one. These attempts at humor were honestly skippable, sometimes detracting from an otherwise beautifully written novel. 

Overall, this was a solid book, especially if one forgets how recently it was published, isn't primed by the idea that it aims to portray a "new gay identity," and doesn’t have as much discomfort for age gaps as I do.