THE PROMISE OF ELSEWHERE

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.