How far we've come from that ur-gay novel, Huck Finn. That's a lot to stack against your protagonist. Whereas the previous book took its hapless protagonist to Europe (on the lam, de rigueur in American fiction), this time Greer dumps the revised and abridged Arthur Less, still a lapsed, or prelapsarian, novelist -though roughly a year has passed, no time at all in the calendar of a procrastinating scribe- partly on the Eastern Seaboard but mostly in the American Southwest, a region ripe for analysis of the Whither-America variety. The comedy was always, always about me.Author Andrew Sean Greer (photo: Civitella Ranieri)
The comedy of my own expectations, mistakes, and bewilderment. Somehow I needed to travel all that way to find that the comedy was about a middle-aged, gay, somewhat Norwegian man wandering the South. It was not about my family or a camper van or the election. The comedy was not about the denizens of that bar, of course. I was up all night listening for “critters.” In the morning, I had my novel-a comic novel. In the RV park, I stared with terror into the gator-ridden river. I left when Rooster ordered more shots I left before things got rowdy. In that dive bar outside Muscle Shoals, I picked a song and bought the one-armed man a beer. This article appeared in the SEPTEMBER 2022 issue of Esquire I bought rounds of beers and put music on the jukebox. Nobody threatened me, but after all, I was middle-aged, male, and white. They all knew I wasn’t from there, and they all knew I was gay. The Oakley shades I bought at Walmart fooled nobody. The notes were hardly a novel: gravestones in a hound-dog cemetery, long-haired musicians playing the Tams down in Natchez, RV parks warning of gators in the bayou or “critters” in the woods, many of them with managers who asked where I was from.When I told them Maryland, they would frown and say, “Now, from your accent I thought you were Norwegian.” My faux-southern accent fooled nobody.
I had two rules: I could visit only small towns, and I had to sit at the bar.
So I rented a camper van in Atlanta and zigzagged through cotton fields and sugarcane. I have never known the South, and after the 2016 election, it became a greater mystery. My father shed all traces of his Kentucky accent, and the many foreign languages he speaks camouflage him in foreignness some people assume he is Norwegian. My mother, who in college had to wear long gloves on Sundays, is now a retired lesbian chemist in San Rafael, California. I had never really visited the South, though it is where my family is from. In preparing for my latest, Less Is Lost, I asked myself: What baffles me? What am I afraid of? The answer came, spelled out as if in alphabet blocks: ALABAMA. I don’t know where novels come from, but I know where they happen: in places of bafflement and unease.
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