Diverting Diversions: Mark Haber On Distractions, Literary Digressions, And The Possibilities Of Fiction

Mark Haber’s new novel, Lesser Ruins, begins with its main character facing grief and spelling out exactly how he plans to avoid it: “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….”

With an echo of Camus’s The Stranger, it is not only the start of one of Haber’s gorgeously digressive, meandering, and yet propulsive sentences, but the first gesture in a grand performance of selfhood and self-deconstruction. It is also the opening of one of the most daring and rewarding American novels in years.

In three successive novels published by Coffee House Press (Reinhardts’s Garden, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, and Lesser Ruins), Haber has blazed a trail deep into his characters’ minds using a particular type of very digressive, internalized dramatic monologue in which the performance of the first-person narrator seems to be directed solely to that same narrator’s skull.

Haber’s characters run in circles, think and rethink, build into orchestral fits of intellect, and gather everything under the sun into their desperate attention to selfhood. That Haber manages to make his books both surprisingly realistic and hilariously comic within these strictures is a testament to the author’s overwhelming skill.

In Lesser Ruins, A retired (or perhaps fired—even the narrator isn’t certain) community college professor obsessed with coffee and Montaigne narrates only an hour or so of his life, though his internal digressions expand the story out to the weeks and years and decades leading up to the present. He is haunted by his lost wife, her illness, his belief that he is a failure both as an academic and a father.

His thoughts range from nineteenth-century dueling culture to his wife’s imagined UFOs to the pinging of the smartphone he doesn’t understand and everything that could be stuffed in between. The overall effect is one of supreme humanism. This is a book about the worst and the best of what we are and have been.

I spoke with Haber in late October about his work. Around us, the election loomed. A great national tension was avoided, for a short time, by talking books.

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Brian Castleberry: Near the beginning of the novel, our narrator lands on a new title for his “book-length essay on Montaigne,” the project that has been his life’s obsession, something he’s always about to work on. He wants to call it “The Intrusion of Distraction.” Can you tell us a little about his thinking here?

Mark Haber: I was frustrated with the intrusions and interruptions into any sort of creative work or sustained thinking which is constant and unavoidable in contemporary life. I’m sure this is common for almost everyone. I wanted my narrator to fuel that idea, to explore it and play with it in all sorts of registers.

Of course, we complain about these interruptions and yes, it’s our culture, but we’re also the culprits. We sabotage ourselves because it’s not easy to break away. And then, if you succeed, if you shut everything down, you have this silence that can be very unnerving.

Why? Because we aren’t used to it. No one has taught us to live among silence, to be alone with our own thoughts. We like to complain about distraction, but of course are lonely in its absence.

I used to think, “it must’ve been so much easier in the past: no cellphones, no streaming, no barrage of useful and useless information.” But we look at the past with rose-colored glasses. We have no idea what it was like in the 1500’s say, or even the 1800’s.

I began writing this book pre-Covid, but it was deep into the pandemic when I was really at work at it. What’s funny is that even in “lockdown” the interruptions, at least for me, were still constant.

I was working at an independent bookstore, Brazos, so after that first week of being home, my wife and I were back at the store shipping out online orders, answering emails, attempting to convert the store to “pandemic conditions,” something entirely novel for the store, like building the bridge as you cross it. The bookstore, besides being online, was ostensibly closed for business.

I think the narrator’s attachment to Montaigne is, like a lot of my characters, his fear of mediocrity or seeing himself that way. He believes if he attaches himself to greatness—Montaigne—than he himself will be great by association.

But we have a lot of hints throughout the novel that he’s not only unable to write this book, he’s also not very good. Sadly, we must conclude that our narrator, despite his best attempts, is probably a very mediocre writer and thinker.

BC: A big target for his complaints about distraction are his students, who he sees as “bovine” and irredeemably distracted. But his teaching style, it’s fair to say, amounts to a pretty distracted and wild performance. It’s also hilariously like his inner monologue: coffee-addled, digressive, given to obsession. How do you see his teaching and what did it reveal to you about his character as you were writing?

MH: Writing is very intuitive for me, so I discover the character as I’m writing. I wanted to sort of straddle the line between comedy and desperation, but also situate the reader as the audience, as if they’re one of his students in the class.

So even though the book is first-person and voice driven and, in a way, very interior, the humor I think comes from those nineteen-year-olds watching this middle-aged man rave about Pushkin’s duel and cuckoldry, buzzing from espressos and Turkish coffee, while at the same time being a man who is damaged and depressed and utterly selfish and arrogant, seconds from a nervous breakdown.

It’s a high-wire act. And he’s obviously frightened, by his wife’s illness and mortality, by middle age and irrelevance, a host of things, and his only solution is to drink more coffee!

Also, I’m trying to poke fun at two things at once: the people addicted to their phones and the people frustrated by the people addicted to their phones. In this instance, his students. He blames the students, but the students aren’t the problem of course and are almost props in these scenes, hence they’re never described very much. Our narrator is living so much in his own mind that the students are almost an afterthought for him.

BC: Digression is key to this whole novel. You wrote an excellent piece about digression in fiction for this publication, and I know you’re a fan of writers like Sebald and Bernhard who use digression as a sort of structuring device. What draws you to this style?

MH: When I say I love fiction, it’s a huge understatement. It’s my favorite thing in the world. I can be sad, depressed, despondent, whatever, and I’ll think of literature, and it makes me happy. A little absurd, I know. But for me fiction offers solace and companionship and philosophy and the elaborate grandeur of language via storytelling in all its styles. It’s endless, right?

But my favorite word to describe fiction is possibility. It offers something other. This single life we have will never be enough, and fiction, for me, is the consolation for that. So, I see digression as a symptom of that love.

By exploring the possibility of a single sentence and seeing where it goes is a joy, a sentence that begins in a college classroom, for instance, and ends up on a field of battle beside Napoleon, that to me is amazing. To have a thread and leave the thread only to pick it up later, it’s obviously a style thing as well, but it’s also a way to make happy mistakes or discover things about yourself and the story.

And the comparisons to Sebald and Bernhard are of course very flattering and they’re fair. But that’s also a style thing. Whereas I have this lifelong affinity for Cervantes and Garcia Marquez, even Borges, which most readers probably don’t pick up on from reading my books, but they’re there. Those digressions into Rimbaud in Northern Africa and the countryside of Bordeaux, that rich world of fictional books and art movements are me literally attempting to take myself and the reader somewhere else.

I also love a page of dense text that can be a river of words and ideas, where you dip your toe in the water and by the bottom of the page the river has taken you somewhere new. I see this a lot with László Krasznahorkia’s books as well. At the same time, I want the writing to be accessible, even conversational. So, if the reader gives themselves over for a page or two, hopefully they’ll be along for the ride.

BC: Your books strike me as intellectual tales of adventure. Reinhardt’s Garden, in a very straightforward way, is an adventure story (about seeking the essence of melancholy), and the grandly self-important critics in Saint Sebastian’s Abyss operate at a heroic level, the minutiae of their disagreements given operatic importance.

How do you see Lesser Ruins and its narrator in relationship to these other works?

MH:I’m happy you see that. I do hope there’s a sense of adventure in my novels; my lodestar has always been Don Quixote which, in essence, is an adventure story.

Ultimately, it’s a soup of impressions and influences and ultimately taste that makes one’s personal literature. I always compare writing with painting: I love Bolaño so—I think—let me add a little Bolaño here, a little bit of green or red (each writer being a color in this instance).

None of this is conscious, I’m not thinking about this while I’m doing it. It’s not stealing or even borrowing as much as using the things I love and inspire to make it my own. I often see a word, a single word, and I’m off. I’ve written four or five pages of text because of a word I really loved.

When Reinhardt’s Garden was published I heard comparisons ranging from Thomas Bernhard to Joseph Conrad, César Aira to Bolaño and many others. All of them valid.

Funny enough, as I was writing the book I began seeing the relationship between the narrator and his mentor, Jacov, like the elevator boy and Ralph Fiennes’ character in The Grand Budapest Hotel, this sort of sweet but dysfunctional relationship between a strong, eccentric older man and a younger impressionable one. So really, so much goes into a book, both the conscious and unconscious. And it’s always subjective: a reader’s opinion is as valid as mine.

But I think the thread that connects my books is a way of seeing the world. There’s an absurdity with the characters and situations—pompous, overblown blowhards with perhaps some good ideas, ideas as a writer I want to explore.

And I love taking something a bit strange and pushing it a bit more. I never think of realism or ask myself: is this something that could really happen? Those questions don’t interest me.

I also think my books take some heavy, philosophical notions, ideas I truly care about, and play around with them. Lesser Ruins continues this I hope, but with a bit more heart and heartbreak. Saul Bellow is another huge influence and I see a bit of Herzog in Lesser Ruins: an intellectual left destitute, whose greatest ideas and works haven’t given him anything in his life but loneliness.

I’ve been describing my books lately as Thomas Bernhard if he’d grown up watching the Coen Brothers. It’s a bit reductive, but it’s so difficult, impossible really, to explain the thousands of books and daydreams, aspirations and conversations that go into a single book. And that’s probably part of the beauty.

BC: Finally, the book is haunted by the recent death of our narrator’s wife after suffering an acute form of early dementia. It’s a subject the character returns to and tries to dodge, again and again. From the incredible first line through to the last, when he prepares to face the “cold hard hour,” it seems as if she has really been THE subject of the book.

What are your thoughts on this? Am I way off?

MH: You’re completely right. However, I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about the subject of the book and must say (as much as you’re right) so is someone that claims the book’s theme is: diversion or distraction. I also think it’s a love letter to books and literature. It’s one of these books, intentionally or not, whose subject changes from reader to reader. I think that’s a benefit? At least I hope it is.

But yes, invoking a great poem, as our narrator does, to nail down the major idea of the book is probably fitting: a person circling the inside of their house trying their best to avoid the “hard cold hour” is probably as close as one might get.