The Promise of Elsewhere

January 1, 2019
A Michigan art-history professor sets off on a journey to see the world's finest architecture and perhaps forget some of life's trials in this keen-eyed comic work.Five months ago, Louie Hake's second marriage collapsed after his wife, a third-grade teacher and amateur actress, was arrested for "gross indecency" with her director in a Honda Odyssey. Three months ago, Louie learned he had an illness that could lead to blindness. So in June 2018, the 43-year-old "untenured fixture" at a third-rate Michigan college embarks on his own odyssey, "the Journey of His Life," aiming to view great buildings in Italy, Turkey, India, and Japan. But Louie, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder 10 years earlier, is sidetracked in ways small and large, perhaps because he has stopped taking his lithium (while still taking Ativan, Wellbutrin, and trazodone). After Rome, he breaks his itinerary and heads to London, site of his first honeymoon, where he almost sleeps with a woman alone on her first honeymoon after being jilted by her fiance but persuaded by the cad's mother (a travel agent!) to take the trip. Following London he seeks out cathedrals of ice among Greenland's glaciers while staying with strange children and their combative father in a dilapidated inn. Leithauser (The Art Student's War, 2009, etc.) shifts affectingly from present-day comic encounters and observations to fraught memories (though how reliable sifted through so many meds?), from Louie's first experience of transcendence at age 9, in the delightful opening, and again in Ely Cathedral, to first love and various brushes with shame and failure. Leithauser, a poet, novelist, and MacArthur Fellow, recalls Stanley Elkin, Wilfrid Sheed, and Richard Ford in this complex anatomy of a midlife crisis and then some.An exceptional glimpse of the human comedy marked by sometimes dazzling prose.

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Starred review from March 1, 2019
The latest offering from Leithauser, a long-revered poet and novelist, is a serene piece of travel fiction starring Louie Hake, an art-history professor who teaches at an unremarkable college in Ann Arbor. Louie has had a rough few months: he has recently been diagnosed with a degenerative vision disorder, his students seem disinterested, and his second marriage has collapsed in tragicomic fashion. To escape the perceived public shame, he jets off?in the face of fierce opposition from his overbearing older sister?to see the wonders of the architectural world found in Rome, India, and Japan. In Italy, however, he throws out his spectacular itinerary to instead head to the drearier surroundings of London, where he drifts in and out of the lives of some wonderfully fascinating fellow travelers. As he restlessly keeps moving, Louie is pulled in numerous contradictory directions: he wants complete isolation, away from all digital connectivity, but simultaneously wants to reconnect with his first wife, get his current wife back, and possibly find new love. Like Andrew Sean Greer's Pulitzer Prize-winning Less (2018), Leithauser's journey novel wonderfully mixes pathos and comedy, and Louie, as he struggles for a sense of value and self, is endearingly and wonderfully human at every moment.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2018

A professor at a modest college in Michigan who's nearing both a second divorce and a possibly disastrous medical diagnosis, middle-aged Louie Hake decides to get relief by touring the world's most stunning architectural sites, from Rome to London to the Arctic (icebergs are the big draw there). From MacArthur Fellow Leithauser (A Few Corrections).

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