Andrew Sean Greer did something rare this week: his latest novel, Less, won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

That’s extraordinary, of course, but what makes this year’s winner so unusual is that his novel is funny. Very funny. Laugh-till-you-can’t-breathe funny.

That just doesn’t happen in the hallowed chambers of literary honour. Pulitzers are endowed on funereal novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or cerebral books such as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. The august gatekeepers might tolerate the humour in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, but Toni Morrison’s Beloved is closer to their solemn hearts.

It’s about time something genuinely comic came out on top

Greer’s Less is nothing like those grave books. It’s not a serious story spiked with comic elements; it’s an unabashed comic novel, a descendant of the great Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

In the opening pages of Less, a 49-year-old writer learns that his former boyfriend is about to get married. To avoid attending the wedding as a heartbroken guest, he embarks on a humiliating trip around the world, teaching classes and delivering readings at any place that will have him.

As a novel, it’s delightful. As a Pulitzer winner, it’s a unicorn.

Oh, I see you reaching back to the early 1980s for John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and Alison Lurie’s Foreign Affairs, but their prizes only suggest the duration of this attitude: American critical opinion has been discounting comic novels for decades. (Toole committed suicide thinking his book would never be published.) We celebrate our stand-up comics, we adore our television sitcoms and we export our comic films, but for some reason our funny novels must subsist on a diet of thin praise.

“A comic novel” has become a suspect designation, as though creating laughter were some sub-craft, like decoupage. We used to know better. William Shakespeare’s comedies are as classic as his tragedies. The light that humour shines on the human condition may be a different frequency, but it’s just as illuminating as its calamitous twin.

Despite their courageous choice, even this year’s Pulitzer judges sound determined to muffle the laughs. Their citation describes Less as “a generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.”

That sounds about as appealing as a pair of orthopaedic shoes.

This is a problem, America.

Why him? Why did they ask Arthur Less? A minor author whose greatest fame was a youthful association with the Russian River School of writers and artists, an author too old to be fresh and too young to be rediscovered, one who never sits next to anyone on a plane who has heard of his books. Well, Less knows why. It is no mystery. A calculation was made: what literary writer would agree to prepare for an interview and yet not be paid? It had to be someone terribly desperate. How many other writers of his acquaintance said “no chance”? How far down the list did they go before someone said: “What about Arthur Less?” He is indeed a desperate man. — Excerpt from the book

Our critical resistance to comic novels attracts fewer writers to the form and leads to less interest from publishers. And that grim bias trudges out across the culture and gets disastrously reinforced in schools. We may all start off by reading the zany antics of Dr Seuss, but by high school, the message is clear: “Abandon all mirth, ye who enter here.” Ennui and despair are the province of the Great American Novel.

But if ever an era needed a good chuckle and a sweet laugh, it’s ours. We have plenty of sharp satirists to fan the flames of our searing political arguments. We know how to mock. We’re experts at sarcasm. What we need more of is laughter — the kind of self-deprecating, warm-hearted, give-me-a-hug laughter that Greer provides in Less.

It’s a lovely irony that the first version of the Pulitzer announcement from the Associated Press mistakenly reported that Greer’s winning book was called Fearless.

Indeed, there is something brave about holding up a comic novel about a forlorn man stumbling through one ridiculous encounter after another and saying, “This is the best book of the year.” Bravo to the Pulitzer judges.

We need more novels like Less.

The writer is the editor of Book World at The Washington Post

*By arrangement with The Washington Post

Less
By Andrew Sean Greer
Lee Boudreaux, US
ISBN: 978-0316316125
272pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 22nd, 2018