The promise of elsewhere, by Brad Leithauser

Louie Hake is forty-three and recently separated from his second wife, Florence.  She has decamped to the Virgin Islands with the director of the theater group she was active in and with whom she was caught in flagrante delicto.  Louie  teaches art history in Ann Arbor, not at that Ann Arbor, but at Ann Arbor College, a small, undistinguished liberal arts institution.  To add to his woes, he is bipolar and has recently been diagnosed with an eye disease that may eventually take his sight.  Who wouldn’t want to escape?  So off he goes on a tour of great architectural monuments in Rome, Istanbul, and as far away as Japan, leaving behind such modern conveniences as his cell phone.  Reaching Rome, however, he goes off his meds and similarly his tour plan goes go off track.  Our hero will take a side trip to England, put his travel itinerary on hold, and will end up, oddly, living in a sketchy B and B called the Rotten Egg in Qaqqatnakkarsimasut, Greenland with an strange man named Bendiks and his two beautiful children.  As time goes on, however, these children more and more begin to remind him of those in The turn of the screw.  Although the book is skillfully and often beautifully written, and is billed as “comic,”  there is way too much inner angst going on to keep some readers trudging on, although trudge I did. The ending seemed particularly anti-climactic.    352 pp.