Lesser Ruins. Mark Haber. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2024. $18.00.
Mark Haber’s first novel, Reinhardt’s Garden, is about a Croatian writer searching for his hero, a philosopher of melancholy, and his second, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, is about two writers, formerly friends, who made their reputations writing about the titular and fictional Dutch Renaissance painting. In his latest, Lesser Ruins, he’s written about another writer who is working on a book about Michel de Montaigne: more writing about a writer writing about a writer. This man, who narrates the novel, has just lost his wife to frontotemporal dementia, and has also been pressured into an early retirement from his post teaching humanities and philosophy at a community college. He should have plenty of time to work on what sounds like a very ambitious work, one he says will “liberate me from mediocrity”, but his son Marcel keeps calling him to talk about electronic dance music, his own obsession, and he’s often distracted by memories, and by his other obsession, coffee, which is supposed to help him think, but becomes its own neurotic task, “the ritual of coffee”.
A sentence in Lesser Ruins will see him start with coffee, which needs to be single origin, and the right roast, and for which one must use the right water, coffee which he pours before he can get into his study where he sits at a rolltop desk and looks at scraps of notes and at the lists of abandoned titles for the book, which frustrate him until his phone makes a chirp, the same chirp it made when his dean left a voicemail informing him of a second emergency review, not that he said explicitly that it was an emergency review, but it was at nine a.m. on a Saturday, so it must have been effectively a second emergency review, and the dean would have resented having to be there at that hour, and so on and on, sometimes for as long as a few pages. Haber has a good sense of balance and rhythm, so Lesser Ruins is curiously easy to read, and curiosity can soon turn to compulsion. He goes on detours, and he will not always find his way back, either to the subject or in his syntax, but there is a terrific momentum, maintained until the climactic and even dramatic ends of the long sections into which the novel is divided. Haber’s narrator gives italic emphasis, both for emotional and ironic purposes, and also to set down terminology in the manner of the professor, to other key terms besides that “ritual” of coffee: his many repetitions of phrases such as “genuine artist” range in effect from the comic and absurd, to the plaintive, to the deliberately irritating. He reports long passages of speech given by Marcel, always on the topics of thumping beats and synth waves, by Kleist, an Austrian sculptor he befriended when he was on a research fellowship in the Berkshires, and by Pleva, the director there, but through him, they all sound just like him, all speaking in the same recursive, often pedantic way, whether about “stupidity” or “uncertainty” or “the quadrangle”.
Haber’s technique is as loud as a roaring stream. It announces itself when you leaf through the book and see the big unbroken blocks of text. This allows him to get things into his novel which while not exactly hiding, are mostly drowned out. The excursions through narrator’s memory to that fellowship in the Berkshires have a strong hint of science fiction separating them from his home life. The place is called the Zybècksz Archives at the Horner Institute, and he will spend much of his time there shuffling between the “Tanner Room” and the “Tanner Reading Room”, once he’s through an antechamber where a “nameless official” scans his identification. Haber is writing both a satire of the most frustrating, bureaucratic parts of academic life, and something more. The Zybècksz Archives presides over letters by Cavendish and Ibsen, and a facsimile of Montaigne’s diary for the narrator to discover, but these are among writings by made up people like “Františka Goldblath” and the enigmatic “Sands”. There are not only fictional academic institutions here, but worlds of scholarship suggested by, for instance, “Sandra Vogel’s study on the correlation between pulmonary infection and sorrow, Tuberculosis and Grief”. The fictional and counterfactual items are nestled among those we recognize. When the narrator is summoned to Director Pleva’s office, he looks at an array of death masks including those of Sergio Boschmann and Kumiko Fukagawa, mathematicians who apparently reduced the universe to a single digit.
This all probably owes a lot to Nabokov’s Ada, with its fictional academic work built around a scheme of an alternative earth called Antiterra where some believe in our earth, called Terra. (John Banville has also done something like this in his novels The Infinities and The Singularities.) What interests in Lesser Ruins is that this interlarding of real and counterfactual, a distinctive if not unprecedented method, is less obvious and even more difficult to admire because Haber’s narrator is so quickly onto something else—such as an incident with his espresso machine which he kept in his classroom at the community college. Nabokov’s translation of Eugene Onegin, with its somewhat submerged connections to Ada, is mentioned in Lesser Ruins, but so are hundreds of other works, literary, philosophical, musical, real and unreal. Probably many other things have been carried along with the current, surfacing here and there too briefly to be caught, for now unknown to the reader. Haber’s narrator, especially when he stands at the head of his classroom, is given to bothersome platitudes about how “the human heart is a goddamn mess” or how music and painting “affirm life and touch the soul”, and when he is finally honest about his grief, the marriage sounds complacent and reassuring, too: “we always found a way to return to one another”. But Haber’s novel about distraction seems to have its own methods of distraction, so you can plan on returning to these lines and seeing that their author was up to something else while your attention was occupied.