Less

If you'd told me at some point while I was reading the first half that I'd give this a 4-star rating, I would have been skeptical. I couldn't tell if it was tragic and sort of pedantically so, or comic and a little too amused at its own cleverness, but really, Greer laid out his protagonist's dilemma explicitly (“The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.”), and then built skillfully to a point when his protagonist, the brave and hapless Arthur Less, embraces the tragicomedy in a way that I found neither sentimental nor fatalistic. Less is a lovely love story, and I can't recall a “serious” novel that made me laugh out loud this frequently. Great Pride Month read, great summer read.