no one cares if you are smart
This Week in Reading
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Less tells the story of Arthur Less, a middling gay writer on the cusp of fifty, who, in an attempt to avoid the embarrassment of attending the wedding of his younger non-boyfriend of nine years, accepts a series of invitations to half-assed literary events around the world. This ramshackle itinerary takes him to Italy to accept an award judged by high school students, to Germany to teach a university course, to India for a writing retreat, to Morocco to attend an exotic birthday party for a friend of a friend he has never met. Books about being an American abroad are usually irritating, but this one was sweet and tender and delightful.
The first stop on his world tour is Mexico City, where he is to speak at a conference on behalf of his former partner, Robert, who is now elderly and dying in Sonoma. What was it like to live with a genius, the head of the conference asks Less. “You and me, we’ve met geniuses. And we know we’re not like them, don’t we,” he tells him wistfully, seemingly unaware that he has blatantly insulted Less to his face. What is it like to live with a genius? “Like living alone with a tiger,” Less thinks. “Like allowing another lover into the house to live with you, someone you’d never met but whom you knew he loved more than you.” The work takes precedence over everything else. Over sleep, over eating, over his partner. Robert, the genius, is enslaved to the work, and Less, the non-genius, is enslaved to Robert’s work too, trying to prompt, trying to inspire, trying to the encourage the genius. He puts on a record, leaves out a book, in hopes that it might tempt the genius out, and thus, make Less part of the process.
Less has written three novels, to some critical and commercial success, but he is not a genius, the way Robert— Pulitzer Prize winning poet— is a genius. (The irony, of course, is that this novel won the Pulitzer itself this past year.)
But here is the thing— no one cares if you are smart. It doesn’t matter, really. His publisher has turned down his latest manuscript, no one turns up to his reading. Being a genius, people care, but being smart— well, lots of people are smart. I have long made peace with the fact that I am averagely above average. The 75th percentile, if you will. I’m smart, but no genius, pretty, but not beautiful. I don’t long to be more, I am smart enough and pretty enough to get away with a lot. 90s parenting put a lot of emphasis on being smart. In an attempt to course correct from centuries of sexism, 90s parents told a generation of girls that it was what was on the inside that mattered. Brains > beauty. A well-intentioned message, to be sure, if one that left me feeling like a floating thought bubble, completely disassociated from my body. I was pegged from a young age as a “smart kid,” a few years ahead in math, my reading level grades beyond my age group. I was no genius, just ahead, and eventually everyone else caught up, and I ended up where I am now, averagely above average. As for the work, I will admit, I do love the work. I haven’t stopped making work, and I probably never will, but I am not at its bidding. Art has never been the cure, or even a salve. It is simply something I do, and continue to do, in order to be a bit better.
There is no real point to being smart. As a society we tie intelligence to inherent value, but why? Being smart doesn’t necessarily make you a good person, or even an interesting one. I suppose we need a few geniuses to invent fire for us, but being smart doesn’t seem to really accomplish a lot. (Maybe if I was smarter, I would invent fire, but honestly, it seems presumptuous to assume that I would be the one best suited to this task.) Perhaps you can do things a little bit faster than someone else, but who is to say what pace we need to be moving at anyways. Being smart feels a little bit like a con. So much of perceived intelligence is just our grasp over language. I can string together a good sentence, but that doesn’t mean my thoughts are actually more interesting or more valuable, just because they are expressed more clearly.
Intelligence is a series of mirages. It is being able to line words up in a clever way, having a store of information about different topics you can dig up, being able to say that something reminds you of something else. What does any of that really accomplish? Smartness is a party trick that we have mistaken for something more.
Most of you are probably familiar with my recent fixation on jock theory. Like everything in my life, jock theory started as a joke and ended up deadly serious. Though our culture reveres sport stars, we fail to show them actual respect; physical aptitude is seen a genetic gift, something that did not require work or effort. Like the beautiful, we assume that the physically gifted lucked into their success. But natural intelligence is also a natural gift. Some people are born brilliant the way some people are born beautiful. And yes, the brilliant must work hard to fulfill their full intellectual potential, just as athletes rise before dawn to run drills, and movie stars spend hours at the gym and tend to their skin to maintain their perfection. “I knew that intellectual attainment was morally neutral at best, but when bad things happened to me I made myself feel better by thinking about how smart I was,” Sally Rooney writes in Conversations With Friends, a book that thoroughly fucked me up a few weeks ago.
I am trying to move away from performing smartness. I don’t need to prove that I am smart anymore; I just want to prove my point (for while I have shunned the lure of smartness, I have not escaped my need to Be Right). Even if I prove that I am smart, that doesn’t mean anything beyond that.
As always, I digress. Arthur Less is smart, and a good writer, but it doesn’t really matter. His writing is good enough to get published, but being smart didn’t ensure him professional success, nor did it guarantee him love and happiness. Not that he doesn’t have these things. Though the novel follows his heartbreak tour of the world, it is clear that he has had a sweet life. He is the sort of dopey, hapless figure who stumbles easily into tenderness—the type of person whose good fortune you can’t quite bring yourself to resent. So Arthur Less was once loved by a genius. Being smart has nothing to do with it.
This book can best be described as sweet. Oh, and romantic, it is so romantic. Homosexuality feels somehow beside the point, yet also the entire point of the novel, which is how I have always felt about my own sexuality. Less is tender and fast and I enjoyed it a lot, but it surprises me that it won the Pulitzer.
Studio-ing
All of my books are at the Bangkok Art Book Fair right now, generously brought along by the Residue Collective. It’s the first time any of my work has been shown internationally! Also, some of my books will be stocked in a couple indie bookstores in LA soon, stay tuned for more details.
Further Reading
Other books I would describe as a sweet beach read: All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin.