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Shortlisted for the 2024 Republic of Consciousness Prize, United States and Canada

... she later admitted having trouble getting through it, actually taken aback, she said, by the tone which felt both condescending and misanthropic and the spate of digressions littering the work which suggested a deep longing for solitude, in short, my rather strong feelings about the human race because it was obvious, she said, I had a deep love for humanity which was at odds with the deep loathing I also had for humanity. One can be both, I explained, myself and Montaigne for example, Itold her, cursed by the need to reconcile a love of humanity with a dread of hu-manity, both of us embracing our species as much as holding them in contempt because, I said, look around, and my wonderful wife, now dead, found it curious that I'd acquired my master's degree on the strength of Montaigne and the Lugubrious Cherubs, which, though respecting the effort involved, felt more than a little antagonistic, as well as uneven, poorly researched, and a trifle deranged,...

Lesser Ruins is Mark Haber's 3rd novel after the brilliant Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss. When the epigraphs for a novel are from Daša Drndić, Leonard Tsypkin and Kafka the reader suspects they are in good hands. When they see the author’s name, they know they are.

All of which set my expectations bar very high, and I should say upfront that my 4 star rating is relative to those expectations, but this is still one of the finest novels I've read in 2024, and I look forward to 'Ada', a novella promised in 2026.

The novel, told in Haber's trademark style of 'Thomas Bernhard if he'd grown up watching the Coen Brothers' opens (this only part of a longer sentence):

Anyway, I think, she’s dead, and though I loved her, I now have both the time and freedom to write my essay on Montaigne�

Our narrator is a professor who has left the community college at which he works. Retired or was fired, there are different versions, he tells us throughout the novel, although when one reads about his idiosyncratic teaching style, and a bizarre accident caused by a Nuova Simonelli espresso machine secretly installed under his desk, one suspects the 'different versions' are rather like Captain Redbeard Rum's .

Around the same time his wife, who had been behaving increasingly erratically, was diagnosed with, ultimately fatal, frontotemporal dementia. And has, a couple of weeks before the novel begins, passed away.

All of which means he is now free to work on his life's work, a ground-breaking book-length essay on Montaigne. Except, as the novel progresses we, and at times he, realise he doesn't really have anything insightful to say on the subject, his writing largely consisting of coming up with hundreds of different titles, and going off on research rabbit holes into peripheral topics, this from when his supportive wife, herself an academic in another field, had yet to become ill:

... she still possessed a generous and forgiving nature, always reassuring me about my work-in-progress which amounted to hundreds of titles for a book-length essay but no book-length essay, nothing resembling a book-length essay, hundreds of titles and not much else, a few paragraphs appropriated from my master's thesis, tame observations about Montaigne's influence and relevance, things I'd read in a dozen forgettable books which all said identical things; Montaigne was the first modern thinker, a profound and original thinker, things any academic could've written and which offered nothing new or original in the study of Montaigne and she, meaning my now-dead wife, was always en-couraging, especially about my acceptance to the Zybècksz Archives at the Horner Institute, boasting to her friends and colleagues, Marcel especially, about the prestige of being invited to such an illustrious artists' colony while he tinkered with the piano or skulked to his bedroom, young and sullen, still a teenager, none of us knowing I'd return three months later with nothing but titles, Gardens of Anguish and Mute Pavilion for example, three months in the Berkshires not without their drama, but returning with only a renewed love for literature and additional ideas for my book-length essay but, again, no book-length essay.

His real passion and expertise is in coffee, rants about modern life that would put the narrator of All My Precious Madness to shame and, most of all, digressions about digressions - indeed the title on which he finally settles, as the novel opens, is The Intrusion of Distraction.

His own musings are frequently interrupted by his son Marcel's calls about his passion for house music, which plays a signficant role in the text and, while some of the artists featured are invented, the novel does come with a real-life .

Which also highlights one example of Haber's to blend the real and the imagined - whether musicians, anecdotes about Montaigne, the coffee machine (Nuova Simonelli is a real brand, but the actor who is mentioned endorsing it is fictional), or academic institutions, the reader is, wonderfully, unsure, without Google assistance, which is researched and which invented.

One also realises that beneath the rather casual dismissal of his wife's death, the narrator is actually left bereft, and this can also be read as a novel about mourning, and indeed the extended period that involves when a loved one mentally slips away.

... like losing a platoon of loved ones, losing an arm or a leg, losing a language, perhaps the essence of my personality, because my wife was how I related to the world and now that she's gone I can't relate to the world, have no desire to relate to the world...

Although that does point to one feature with this novel. While Haber starts with a comically obsessed narrator, whose "dead wife's" departure is convenient for his literary project he, rightly, I think make him into a more rounded character, but it does lessen the comedy that was so striking in the earlier novels.

And my personal taste certainly doesn't extend to coffee (I'm strictly team tea) or to house music (give me Judas Priest) so those elements of the novel - and one could also argue this is a book about coffee, or a novel about, and patterned after, house music - rather passed me by.

Nevertheless another excellent novel from one of my favourite contemporary writers.

The publisher - Coffee House Press

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