Benign Neglect

This makes it easier to carp at the current offering, an oddly disjointed effort entitled Close to the Sun Again. It begins as a chronicle of the life of Ira Groome, formerly a naval commander and still a superior fellow. He is located in Sao Paulo, directing the operations of a great corporation, when his alcoholic wife dies of cancer and he decides to return to Toronto and accept the duties of police commissioner. Now in his middle fifties, he is a cold fish, distant from his only son, and an altogether fine candidate, in a contemporary novel, for a crack-up. And this is what we get: crack-up with flashbacks.

Groome installs himself in the old Wilkinson mansion in Toronto, with his man Horler at his side. He is still the Commander, never more impressive than when he leans on his cane to ease the leg damaged by a war wound. He takes a mistress, who is puzzled by his detachment. He shows the first signs of being puzzled by it himself, as he starts fortifying himself with gin early in the morning. Feeling bored, he removes himself to a clinic for wealthy alcoholics, needing less to dry out than to be alone and sort out his life.

MR

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Mitchell S. Ross

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This makes it easier to carp at the current offering, an oddly disjointed effort entitled Close to the Sun Again. It begins as a chronicle of the life of Ira Groome, formerly a naval commander and still a superior fellow. He is located in Sao Paulo, directing the operations of a great corporation, when his alcoholic wife dies of cancer and he decides to return to Toronto and accept the duties of police commissioner. Now in his middle fifties, he is a cold fish, distant from his only son, and an altogether fine candidate, in a contemporary novel, for a crack-up. And this is what we get: crack-up with flashbacks.

Groome installs himself in the old Wilkinson mansion in Toronto, with his man Horler at his side. He is still the Commander, never more impressive than when he leans on his cane to ease the leg damaged by a war wound. He takes a mistress, who is puzzled by his detachment. He shows the first signs of being puzzled by it himself, as he starts fortifying himself with gin early in the morning. Feeling bored, he removes himself to a clinic for wealthy alcoholics, needing less to dry out than to be alone and sort out his life.