With the publication of Lesser Ruins, Mark Haber has written three novels about deeply weird men whose visions of life are radically restricted by the tiny, tiny aperture of their obsessions. In Reinhardt’s Garden (2019), the narrator compulsively follows an eccentric tobacco magnate named Jacov, himself obsessively trailing a philosopher whose work he has severely misread. Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (2022) is narrated by an art critic who shares with his best friend-turned-academic rival a mania for the small dark painting of the novel’s title, and whose obsession about his opinion on aesthetic judgment fractures the friendship. In Lesser Ruins, Haber introduces us to a narrator with a whole tangle of obsessions: fine coffee, his long-unwritten book on Michel de Montaigne, and most importantly the recent death of his wife from a horrific degenerative brain disease. For all their darknesses—melancholy, apocalypse, death—Haber’s three novels are very funny. Obsession often is—it pulls us into unusual shapes, distorts the angles of our personalities. (Who among us hasn’t felt himself become a different person, lopsided and ridiculous, when struck by an obsessive crush?) It is true too of Haber’s sentences, structured by their narrators’ obsessions. For instance, the opening of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss:

Captured here is Haber’s tidal motion: moving, but slowly, full of repetitions and feedback loops, two sentences about reading and rereading that, between them, are written and rewritten.

Really, Haber’s novels are about mediocrity, as he notes in an interview with BOMB, which has everything to do with desire—and politics, too. Mediocrity is terrifying; mediocrity is a shared human condition. Hence the optimism laced through Haber’s work: his characters’ fear of mediocrity ceases to be a merely personal anxiety, instead energizing collective desire for better art and a better world. Even at their bleakest, bogged in horrors both personal and historical, Haber’s novels are too besotted by art to collapse totally into despair, to end up anything other than optimistic. Call it a mediocre optimism, at once, limited and grounded, appetitive and utopian. 

As in Saint Sebastian’s Abyss—for whose art-critic characters the threat of mediocrity makes art vitally necessary and also a delicate thing to be protected from most people—mediocrity in Lesser Ruins organizes a whole phalanx of personal and world-historical problems. Its narrator, a community-college professor, hopes “to escape mediocrity” by finishing a book on Michel de Montaigne, which after years of work exists mostly as a list of hundreds of possible titles. (Haber has a gift for titles: Pastures of Affliction, Gardens of Anguish.) He wins a fellowship to the aptly titled Zybècksz Archives at the Horner Institute, which he believes will allow him to finally complete (begin) his book. His time instead passes in comedic distractions, like the fact that all library books must be physically re-borrowed every thirty minutes. The problem that most obsesses the novel, however, is death. The narrator’s wife dies from a brain disease shortly before the novel begins, and her death, which ruins him organizes Lesser Ruins from its first line:

This beginning might seem to set up a sinister novel: he’s killed his wife to write his book on Montaigne! It’d be very Nabokov: you can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. But in fact the line sets up only his delirious pain and obsessive efforts to distract himself from it. “Anyway, I think, she’s dead”—there’s an echo of Camus, and the bathos of his wife’s death does not obscure some murderous reality but is as straightforward and sad as it seems on the surface. The only things buried here are the narrator’s feelings about his wife—”and though I loved her”—which are literally subordinated syntactically. Given primary position in the sentence and his life are time and freedom. These two words demonstrate the sentence’s Haberian structure: the repetition of “time and freedom” on each side of a comma, near the middle, sees the sentence converging, turning, then spinning out again. It’s the style of obsession, a little pause before another roll down the hill. But this momentum—what really makes the sentence a Haber sentence is all of this happening at once—leads the sentence back where it began. No progress has been made. The undulating obsession of the sentence, up and down through clauses and asides, ends up circular, orbiting forever the essay on Montaigne, on which, likewise, no progress is ever made. The last bit of the sentence, like the narrator, has one eye on the future (the libraries and archives the narrator will visit) and one eye on the past (the twenty years of the Montaigne essay), and sits right between them, going nowhere. 

The narrator cannot begin the Montaigne book because he fears he will produce “only bad ideas badly stated, in short mediocrity and incoherence,” which he associates with contemporary people who “beg for interruption and, by default, mediocrity,” a “species on the decline.” Instead of writing, the narrator constantly rants. John Limon, in Death’s Following: Mediocrity, Dirtiness, Adulthood, Literature, calls the rant the “essential art form of the mediocrity,” an “elevation and imposition of powerlessness.” Mediocrity, as “practice for being forgotten,” constitutes real “adulthood,” a better way to live in the face of death. Limon’s favorite literary example is Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, whose narrator rants in order to (barely) live on after the pianistic dreams he and friend Wertheimer hold are obliterated by the arrival of Glenn Gould at their conservatory. 

(Few writers address mediocrity directly, I suspect, because writing requires attention, worry, and admitting to worrying about being mediocre is embarrassing, even shameful. In fact, even though writing about desire can itself feel hugely embarrassing and shameful, at least for people with evangelical childhoods like mine, it’s nevertheless less harrowing for me to write that my first encounter with The Loser was an erotic arthouse video, a woman building towards an orgasm while reading Bernhard aloud in French, than it is to write about how easily I have “identified with” the narrator of The Loser and his friend Wertheimer.)

The ranting in Lesser Ruins contains more desire, less foreclosure. Limon sees rants as “self-mortification,” attempts “to purge . . . obsessions and passions,” but if Haber’s rants are purgative, the return is pleasurable, a lingering second encounter. There’s plenty of vitriol, but even more love, especially love of artworks, whether Dutch mannerist painting or the Essais. His narrators love helplessly. Their fervid rejections of so much else in the world point back to the fervor of their love for art, their incapability of accepting the fact that nearly everything else that exists is nothing like art. They feel the unbeauty of the world as a betrayal—they are jilted, wronged. And in these feelings—which are frequently immature and maladjusted—there’s something utopian: not just that it would be awfully nice if the world shone at every moment with the brilliance of art, but a barely controlled longing for that world, a total orientation of life towards that possibility. 

But that possibility collides with the violence of history. Hence the narrator’s inability “to reconcile a love of humanity . . . with the deep loathing I also had for humanity.” It’s an antipodal tension, a contradiction: humanity as open future and bloodied history. Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau names this tension mediocrity, developed historically alongside the novel itself, a form uniquely capable of “indicat[ing] our duality (or duplicity) . . . conjoining the noble and ignoble.” On one hand, nobility: Haber’s narrator believes he can become more thoroughly human and alive through aesthetic experience. At times this is silly; as a child, he imagines he can escape his “moderately unhappy youth fenced in by mediocrity” by drinking coffee, which will release his “mystic yearning, a desire for philosophy and music, literature and art, in short, transcendence.” A cup of coffee lacks Damascene drama, but a desire for something richer and sharper than the life offered, especially to young people, by American culture is not just understandable but inevitable and worth taking seriously. Here, mediocrity is the beginning of a desire for beauty, for something other than what exists. As the narrator concludes, “I had both coffee and Montaigne to thank for helping me escape mediocrity, because in a sense coffee introduced me to myself, coffee confirmed the intuition of something other.” (I’m necessarily sympathetic to Haber’s narrator because I too grew up with a desire for a different kind of life I could not find language for, and I tried to realize that life by changing the objects I consumed.) The intuition of something other is where all significant work begins—it’s something like hope itself.

On the other hand, ignobility: all this hope happens against the bloody curtain of history. Mediocrity’s historical counterpart in Lesser Ruins is stupidity. At the Horner Institute, the narrator meets Kleist, “an acclaimed Viennese sculptor” whose work addresses stupidity as its “theme and obligation.” To Kleist, whose parents survived the Holocaust, stupidity is less a failing of individuals than something implacable, a historical inevitability: “stupidity wins, as it will always win in the end until the end of days because . . . stupidity is the single strongest element in the universe.” At the Institute, Kleist completes her masterwork before, drunk and raving, she runs into a blizzard with a final denunciation of humanity: “a dead species, a species already extinct but terrifically oblivious of its own extinction . . . we’re already dead.”

Lesser Ruins uses mediocrity and stupidity to address the terrible scalar gap between individual experience and historical time. It recalls the work of W.G. Sebald, whom the narrator quotes: “behind all of us who are living there are the dead.” It might seem impossible, even offensive, to compare the personal and the world-historical, but Haber’s narrator is committed to doing so: “seeing my wife lose herself to frontotemporal dementia was no different than a world war.” And he is correct, insofar as horror forces a confrontation with stupidity, with mediocrity, whether that horror is local or global, immediate or centuries-long. There is horror in Kleist’s view of history, and there is horror in the fact that her body is not recovered for three days, delayed by the fact that the narrator, amidst severe caffeine withdrawal, “didn’t search for Kleist as hard as I probably should’ve, meaning not at all, because that night, following her lunatic flight, I’d scrambled to my cottage to make the shit-black instant coffee filched from her counter.” All horror shares something. 

So what, in the face of horror, are we supposed to do? The answer Haber’s novels would prefer is art, but art is never exactly an answer. As the narrator of Lesser Ruins despairs, “all those books about death and words about death couldn’t defeat death.” Maybe defeat is not the goal. Even against agony, language persists, not as a feel-good keep carrying on but a minimal optimism of negating negation. Gazing at Kleist’s masterwork, the narrator thinks, “it made me feel, what I wasn’t sure, but that was beside the point because naming or exploring the feeling was futile . . . and I recalled E.E. Cummings, who said: since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things.” But Haber’s novels, their sentences, absolutely pay attention to the syntax of things. To keep with syntax, to write, opens a syntactical optimism; and yet. 

In this light, the end of Lesser Ruins forms a kind of dialectical cap to Haber’s trilogy of novels. Reinhardt’s Garden ends by ironically anticipating a twentieth century “that promised to be more placid and untroubled than any in history, and if I heard the marching of boots, they were the boots of progress, and I envisioned a Europe with optimism and zeal.” Against this cheeriness leans the end of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, its narrator walking away from the painting, once the center of his life and work, now “dead.” Lesser Ruins finishes without a note of either ahistorical optimism or pessimistic renunciation, but instead with the narrator’s return, on the phone with his son Marcel, which is to say, to language. Finally speaking his wife’s name aloud, he “gaze[s] at the blank page and the blank page welcomes me, the blank page spreads its arms like an immense field, a perennial night, and Marcel still hasn’t spoken, still hasn’t said a word, and for a fourth and final time I say her name out loud prepared at last for the hard cold hour.” This isn’t a cheap victory, language as healing or triumphant human spirit. It’s about the zeroth-order desire that renders the blank page both abyss and beginning. Nothing is solved: the narrator’s wife remains dead, his book remains unwritten, and the twentieth century Kleist condemns remains historical reality. And yet.

Mediocrity is ordinary. And this, finally, is the political salience of Haber’s work. Mediocrity opens an opportunity for solidarity. There is a hope, a glimmer of redemption, in mediocrity. The hope appears when we realize that our personal mediocrity resembles another struggle—that our dissatisfactions with our failures (to be better artists, partners, friends) echo a larger dissatisfaction with the world as it is and has been. The disdain his narrators hold for bad art and most people is also a desire for better life. They cannot bear the reduction of art, life’s great hope, into an emotional vending machine, what the late Fredric Jameson calls a consumable “feeling-tone.” In his essay “Culture is Ordinary,” Raymond Williams takes issue with conservatives and certain Marxists alike who deny the ability of ordinary people to engage with art. His point is not that all artworks are equally successful or that we ought to get rid of aesthetic judgment, but that all people could, if offered education and access, engage seriously with the very best artworks because all people share a “natural fineness of feeling” and “quick grasp of ideas.” This is a democratic sentiment, and Williams makes recommendations for real social democracy: publicly funded education and cultural institutions. 
Lesser Ruins points in a similar direction: away from austerity, towards thriving aesthetic life. It dreams of a world in which everyone can be “the most immaculate creature on earth . . . the serious reader seizing each book with wide-eyed possibility because serious readers, I felt, were utopians and every book an attempt at transcending oneself.” Transcendence, in other words, as ordinary—mediocre.

Ryan Lackey is a writer, critic, and PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley. His work has appeared in Post45 Contemporaries, Los Angeles Review of Books, Joyland, and elsewhere. He has a cat named Bartleby whose favorite film is the 2011 sci-fi western Cowboys and Aliens. 

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