His Pulitzer-Winning Comedy Broke the Rules. He’s at It Again.
In the spring of 2018, the novelist Andrew Sean Greer was working as the director of a writers residency in Tuscany, where his unofficial duties included cleaning up after an incontinent pug.
The pug belonged to his boss, a baronessa, and Greer felt the frequent messes had gotten out of hand. “I decided we can’t have this happening at the dinner table,” Greer recounted recently at a coffee shop in the West Village. “Margaret Atwood is coming, and I was like, we can’t.” Greer began dressing the dog in diapers, held in place with snazzy rainbow and rhinestone suspenders.
One evening, after he had finished swaddling the pug, he got a barrage of congratulatory text messages, with emojis of fireworks and dancing ladies.
Puzzled, Greer called a friend, the novelist Michael Chabon, who confirmed the news: Greer’s novel “Less” had won the Pulitzer Prize. “He was like, am I the person who’s telling you?” Greer recalled. (He was.) The fact that Greer had just wrangled a pug into diapers made the life-altering news seem all the more surreal. “Less” — a rollicking romantic comedy about a heartbroken novelist who goes on a journey around the world to avoid his ex-boyfriend’s wedding — was not a typical choice for the prize committee, which tends to favor dense novels with lofty themes.
