In Defense of the Comic Novel: Andrew Sean Greer Talks Less is Lost
b'Arthur Less is a novelist\\u2014a \\u201cminor American novelist,\\u201d to be precise. He\\u2019s a man whose biggest talent seems to be taking a problem and making it five times worse. And he\\u2019s the hero of Andrew Sean Greer\\u2019s novel \\u201cLess,\\u201d which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, an especially rare feat for a comic novel.\\xa0\\xa0\\nAndrew Sean Greer is now out with a sequel, \\u201cLess Is Lost,\\u201d which takes Arthur on a road trip across the U.S. He talks with the staff writer\\xa0Parul Sehgal.\\xa0\\nPlus, for thirty years, the poet Ellen Bass has taken the same walk almost every day, on West Cliff Drive, a road along the ocean in Santa Cruz, California. Friends and family have teased her for being stuck in her ways, so she wrote the poem \\u201cOde to Repetition,\\u201d about taking the same walk, listening to the same songs, and doing the same daily tasks, as life marches toward its end. (This segment originally aired May 26, 2017.)'