It’s not every day a book gets passionately recommended in the Whatsapp group of my high school friends. But then LESS is not an everyday book. Sometimes books just deserve to win all this prizes. This is one, and it has. Or at least the Pulitzer, which is all you need. It’s a coming of age story, and the age that’s coming is middle age.
What does the camel love? I would guess nothing in the world. Not the sane that scours her, or the sun that bakes her, or the water she drinks like a teetotaller. Not sitting down, blinking her lashes like a starlet. Not standing up, moaning in indignant fury as she manages her adolescent limbs. Not her fellow camels, to whom she shows the disdain of an heiress forced to fly coach. Not the humans who have enslaved her. Not the oceanic monotony of the dunes. No the flavourless grass she chews, then chews again, in a sullen struggle of digestion. Not the hellish day. Not the heavenly night. Not sunset. Not sunrise. Not the sun or the moon or the stars. And surely not the heavy American, a few pounds overweight but not bad for his age . . .
How awful for the string of inequities to be brought out in his mind, that useless rosary, so he can finger again those memories; the toy phone his sister received while he got nothing, the B in chemistry because his exam handwriting was poor, the idiot rich kid who got into Yale instead of him,the men who chose hustlers and fools over innocent Less, all the way up to his publisher’s polite refusal of his latest novel and his exclusion from any list of best writers under thirty, under forty, under fifty—they make no lists above that. The regret of Robert. The agony of Freddy. His brain sits before its cash register again, charging him for old shames as if he has not paid before. He tries but cannot let it go. It is not the money, he tells himself, but the principle. He has don’t everything right, and they have conned him once again. It is not the money. And then, after he passes Vuitton, Prada, and clothing brands based on various liquors and cigarettes, he admits it to himself at last: It is indeed, the money.
SPOILER ALERT It ends happily, in a way that involves the much younger man. I don’t think I could have handled it for it to end in any other way. You can always tell I like a book when my blog post is nothing but extracts. Let’s end with him with the much younger man:
He kisses – how do I explain it? Like someone in love. Like he has nothing to lose. Like someone who has just learned a foreign language and can only use the present tense and only the second person. Only now, only you.