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.
Leithauser shifts affectingly from present-day comic encounters and observations to fraught memories, 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.
... charming and moving ... Leithauser’s novel offers civilized comforts of beguiling characters, witty dialogue, and trenchant observations about modern life that enshrines the visceral pleasures of armchair travel.
