On the strength of his two prior novels — Reinhardt’s Garden and Saint Sebastian’s Abyss — Mark Haber became one of my all-time favorite authors. Lushly, frenetically, yet clearly written, those novels deal with melancholy and madness, betrayal and loss, despair and grief, all while containing loads of humor and humanity. I could not have been more excited when I finally got my hands on an early copy of his new novel — Lesser Ruins, out today! I’ve read it twice. I love it. I knew I would love it from the first, disturbing, terribly sad lines:

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, an essay requiring not only extraordinary focus and intellect but also time and freedom, time and freedom being necessary for the composition of my essay on Montaigne, since freedom, specifically financial freedom, will provide the means to set my plans in motion, meaning the time required to visit the libraries, universities, and archives vital to finish the book-length essay I vowed more than twenty years ago to complete.

Those lines introduce us to the inner thoughts of our protagonist, a community college professor — at least, up until an emergency review — whose wife, after suffering from dementia, recently died and who appears to be callously dealing with his severe loss by trying to look at the bright side: he will now finally be able to finish his book-length essay on Montaigne, a project he’s been working on for decades without much success. Though he has a treasure troves of great titles — the book-length essay will never live up to the promise of these titles — the essay has never gotten even close to getting off the ground. Perhaps now, at this moment of major change, now that he has time and freedom, he can finally show others what he has known all along: he is not mediocre.

Divided into three parts with no other paragraph breaks, Lesser Ruins is a portrait of a frantic mind, frantic because of his loss, frantic because some part of him likely knows the life he thought he’d live is increasingly unlikely, frantic because he has no idea how to find his footing, or, as he puts it, a way to find peace of mind, a mind free of distraction, a mental Sahara. And so we watch a mind that is not at peace rant about how much he needs that mental Sahara! I think he’s frantic because he knows that time and freedom, while important, are actually not going to be enough for him to figure out how to express the tumult he feels when he thinks about Montaigne, which is the tumult he feels and avoids when reflecting on his own life.

One thing that he has that does bring comfort and satisfaction is coffee, indeed he spends a lot of time “pondering the exultation coffee afforded, the nut-brown granules, the aroma, the sensuous dignity of the custom.” This “sensuous dignity” is a distraction in which he can fully indulge. I think it’s because he can break the coffee down beautifully into nuance and delight. Though complex, the financial resources and the time he has devoted to it has already paid off. And as silly as it might seem, his discursions on coffee are rhapsodic.

His son, Marcel, who is old enough to have fairly recently left the house to find his own path, is going through grief as well and has his own deep passion that has inspired his own rhapsody: electronic dance music. Now I have never had any real interest in electronic dance music, and neither does our narrator, but Marcel has inherited his father’s ability to wax poetic and inspire — in me, at least, if not in his father — a curiosity. He clearly knows his subject and wants to share his passion. I love it. But even more I love thinking about how these two have found the ability to get lost in their passions, why they want to share them, indeed, insist the audience capture their message, and what that means as we look at what they’ve lost.

This is a book about grief. Even though the opening sentence looks a bit callous, as if our narrator has easily accepted and perhaps even welcomed his wife’s death since it has freed him up to work on his book-length essay on Montaigne, this is a man who is not doing well, and, importantly to his character, he knows it even as he tries to avoid it:

. . . because I’ve begun to sense the stirrings of an inner-crisis, nameless and new, approaching fast, each time I walk by my dead wife’s closet or consider passing my dead wife’s closet, the inner-crisis clambering ever closer, and frankly I’m frightened, terrified of the silence which has assumed the proportions of a creature announcing itself in the contours of her absence, a silence insisting my wife is dead, reminding me my wife is dead, as if I don’t know, as if I’m not already avoiding my dead wife’s closet, the nightstand too, the prescription bottles arranged like a tableau of madness, the purgatorial stench of illness, the echo of her rants, those rants about spaceships which, toward the end, illustrated how gone she was.

Though our narrator tries to veer away from his gulf with distractions (including long discourses on the how horrible the modern age is with its distractions), with repetition and return (something Marcel would appreciate in his music), he comes back to his wife in powerful passages. Here is one I particularly loved:

I recalled some indiscriminate morning, waking up beside her, observing the shape of her unconscious back, the slow rise and fall of sleeping breaths, knowing one day she, us, this, would be gone, and how delicate and swiftly obscured those rare moments of naked clarity are, I thought then, and think again now, the seconds which are solemn and good, like that anonymous morning God knows how many years ago, one of thousands, where I awoke and knew enough to observe the passing tremor of time, like the flutter of wings, the finale nature of all of us . . .

This novel, though tied to this particular narrator’s thoughts, is expansive. Grief as a theme is not limited to the narrator’s loss of his wife. There are many losses, many horrible things that remind our character — and humanity — of how fragile things are, how vulnerable we are. And it’s about how art (for the narrator it’s literature, for his son it’s music, for his friend it’s sculpture) can function in this often horrible, often beautiful, great mess.