Category: James Joyce Ulysses

I finished the new Pulitzer prize winner for fiction, Less: A Novel last night. The Pulitzer committee obviously went in a different direction this year to showcase humor – although last year’s winner, The Sympathizer, was also funny in parts.

The protagonist Arthur ‘Less’ is a gay man traveling the world to avoid his ex-lovers wedding. Less is a somewhat acclaimed writer; some of the international invitations he has accepted are prize ceremonies and other author focused events.  He is anxious about turning 50 and being “the first homosexual ever to grow old” but he is (at the very beginning of the novel) also excited about his new book:

“But this new book! This is the one! It is called Swift (to whom the race does not go): a peripatetic novel. A man on a walking tour of San Francisco, and of his past, returning home after a series of blows and disappointments (“All you do is write gay Ulysses,” said Freddy); a wistful, poignant novel of a man’s hard life. Of broke, gay middle age.”

As a former Ulysses scholar I loved this reference to a “gay Ulysses” walking around San Francisco.

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