SAINT SEBASTIAN'S ABYSS

A friendship between two art scholars warps and cracks over an obscure early Renaissance painting.

The unnamed American narrator of Haber’s careful, fuguelike intellectual satire is convinced that Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, a 16th-century painting by Count Hugo Beckenbauer, is a masterpiece. His Austrian colleague, Schmidt, agrees, and since discovering the painting as students at Oxford, they’ve written 20 books between them celebrating the work. But their reasons for that admiration diverge, and as the narrator heads to Berlin to visit Schmidt on his deathbed, he recalls various reasons for their disagreements. The narrator believes Schmidt has faked his passion for the work as a way to claim ground as a Beckenbauer authority. Schmidt, for his part, believes that the narrator’s American background makes him a second-rate intellect. (He likens America to “an obese infant with a concussion.”) In time, it becomes clear that the pair’s books aren’t feats of research so much as salvos in a decadeslong pissing match. Haber deliberately withholds details about the painting itself—we know there’s a donkey, a cliffside, rays of light, and apostles, but not enough to sense why the men are so thunderstruck. And in a way, they hardly seem to know themselves. As they squabble over Beckenbauer—to the point of wrecking the narrator’s two marriages, he claims—it’s increasingly questionable whether the artist was worth the trouble. (The biographical details suggest that he was a sex-obsessed syphilitic whose work, aside from the title painting, was unremarkable.) The recursiveness of the narrator’s sentences creates a sense that scholarship is a kind of prison, killing a love of art rather than expanding it. That strategy gives a fussy, mannered quality to the prose, but it does serve the point that obsession can lead to a crushing cynicism.

A darkly funny novel about the wages of small-stakes intellectual combat.