Less’s strategy is also the strategy of “Less.” The novel maintains a delicious comic buoyancy as it follows the antics of its Buster Keatonish protagonist, buffeting him with one obstacle after another only to have him land, each time, on his feet. What if he rewrote his tragedy as a farce? Inspiration flows: “With a joy bordering on sadism, he degloves every humiliation to show its risible lining.” Laughter suddenly replaces sighs and tears, and a holy fool steps in for a puffed-up hero. The book, as even Less comes to see, has been artistically petrified by his character’s self-pity, that “gorgon of Caucasian male ego.” It’s as good as dead. “It’s a little hard to feel sorry for a guy like that,” a lesbian friend explains. Less is shocked when his publisher rejects it outright.

Less, like Greer, is a middle-aged gay white novelist his latest manuscript, “Swift,” is a sombre tale of-what else?-a middle-aged gay white man who wanders around San Francisco à la Leopold Bloom in Dublin, suffering various setbacks and contemplating his regrets.

Or so Arthur Less, the protagonist of “ Less,” Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer-winning 2017 novel, is forced to conclude. But a gay white guy as a marginalized hero, an underdog whose private tragedies we mourn? That’s a harder sell. Wickham is given to Dex, a white seducer who deploys his Tom of Finland physique and sterling Instagram politics to prey upon his dazzled prospects. Take the recent film “Fire Island,” Joel Kim Booster’s adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice”: while the Bennet sisters are transformed into a gaggle of gay friends of color (mostly), the role of the villainous Mr. Not as notorious as his heterosexual counterpart, more socially privileged than his queer peers, he has been drained of popular sympathy by virtue of his cultural success.

Andrew greer less is lost