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It's hard not to go into this without some expectation. This won the Pulitzer after all. High literature and human comedy - we're setting the difficulty level on expert here. Freighted with all that, I'm underwhelmed at the offset. Arthur nearly misses hosting an author interview due to a stopped clock and a handler who thinks he should be a woman.

Where are we going with this? It's starts to feel like a gay Eat, Pray, Love. “A white middle-aged American man walking around with his white middle-aged American sorrows? ...It's a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that.” notes Arthur's lesbian friend at one point in the novel. And his pratfalls begin to appear less dire misfortune but rather a product of his own self-consciousness.

But Greer does manage to win me over.

Arthur is nearing fifty having survived life's “humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life.” This is warmth in book form. Moments of wonder and unexpected beauty written with an easy grace that had me rooting for Arthur. And Greer really stuck the landing on this one. Lovely.