LESSER RUINS

A widowed professor struggles with writing, coffee, antisemitism, and dance music.

The narrator of Haber’s elliptical, mordantly funny third novel can’t get his mind in order. Now that he’s left his job teaching humanities and philosophy at a community college—he won’t say if he quit or was fired—he’s determined to finish his long-gestating book-length essay on Montaigne. But interruptions abound. He’s still mourning the recent death of his wife from dementia, his DJ son keeps calling to natter on about trends in electronic dance music, and he can’t stop obsessing over his former employer’s disciplinary hearings or the artists’ retreat where he befriended a brilliant but troubled sculptor. The novel’s orthographic structure underscores the narrator’s near-derangement: The book is effectively three long paragraphs, rife with lengthy sentences that often end in very different places from when they began. So it’s not hard to see why the narrator’s book project has failed to come together, and his complaint that “the modern world has destroyed the ability to have a single unfettered thought” seems a scapegoating of his emotional disarray. As he shares more about his life, comic incidents rise to the surface, like his ill-fated effort to maintain an espresso machine under his classroom desk. But darker details emerge as well, about his wife’s rapid decline and the antisemitism the sculptor and her family experienced. Soon, the narrator’s obsession with finding space to think—a “mental Sahara,” as he puts it—begins to feel more like a dereliction of moral duty to his family and students. Though Haber tells this story in long sentences, the language never becomes ungainly or abstractly Gertrude Stein–like. And as the narrator cycles between joy, regret, and frustration, the language echoes his struggle. (“Was my life merely procrastination and delay, a false endeavor never to bear fruit?”) But while the narrator’s mind is chaotic, Haber’s command is steady.

An inventive meditation on grief and art.