Coffee House
Review by Walter Cummins

Just opening a copy of Lesser Ruins at any point and encountering a two-page spread of a single block of type signals a challenge for the reader, and it’s not just those pages because the novel is presented as three sections, each one an unending pack of words without a paragraph break and a scarcity of periods, the punctuation primarily commas and an occasional semicolon, sentences of one clause after another that go on for pages, accumulations of digressive thoughts that conjoin obsessive topics—like the narrator’s wife’s death, her madness, his craving for coffee, Stravinsky’s music, the Holocaust, his dullard students, his son’s quest for the best underground dance music—that dominate the narrator’s mind, each an offshoot in a different direction, returning to thoughts that started pages ago, indicating that the narrator cannot bring a subject to a focused conclusion, instead picking up and attempting to expand upon a topic that never come to a resolution, while often suggesting a link that means returning to ideas about a previous issue that had been dropped when another digression came to mind, a mind filled with an abundance of details related to the well-known or obscure, all indications of impressive knowledge that overflows the narrator’s mind and makes it impossible for him to focus on or—more significantly—even begin his aspirations for a major project, writing a book-length manuscript on the topic of Montaigne, even though he has abundant time because he retired from or was fired by the community college where he taught nothing but two courses, Humanities 102 and Philosophy 103, but no longer because of an agonizing burn from the explosion of the Nuovo Simonelli expresso machine secreted in his classroom, and because he no longer has to care for his now-dead wife who had lost her mind to a madness that gave her litanies of demands, although he is still bombarded with smartphone calls and messages from his son, Marcel, whom he loves but doesn’t understand, and who is obsessed with compiling programs of what he calls electronic house music that is meaningless to the narrator, a man fixated on finding a title for the Montaigne book that he is unable to begin because of the intrusions of mental Saharas in which he finds only tiny inlets of coherence amid vast continents of incoherence.
Rather than telling a story, the novel reveals the essential helplessness of the man that, in part, makes him an absurd figure who mocks his students as bovine jackals and who is aware that his own coffee obsession is ridiculous. Yet while he is a comic figure, the intelligence of his references, the compelling rhythms of his ongoing ramblings, and the haunting heartache that informs all that he says and does elicits a complex sympathy. This is a man grieving the death of a wife whom he truly loved, a man who wants to matter through all that he wants to offer, manifesting the suppressed love that is the source of a deep emotional pain. Here is one expression of this pain, this time after the explosion of his coffee maker during a session of Philosophy 103 that ended his affiliation with the college:
… likewise knowing I would never return the Nuovo Simonelli expresso machine because of its sensuous curves and stainless steel frame which evoked passion and a contemplation approaching, dare I say, the celestial, as well as a lustrous reflection on my face, gracefully distorting the expression of a man whose wife was dying, who went home, paid the nurse, and looked into the disheveled face of the only woman he’d ever loved, who on most days smelled of her own shit because the nurse hadn’t changed her and of course I would keep the espresso machine, I thought, because watching my wife my dissolve extinguished the little faith I’d had in the world and the dean sighed, sorely disappointed, she said, dumbfounded, she added ….
This passage extracted from an ongoing rambling exemplifies the illogical linkages emerging from his random mind that exist throughout the entire novel—here the beauty of the espresso maker, the changing expression on his face, her foul smell of the disheveled woman he had loved, keeping the coffee machine because her dying had ended his faith in the world, concluding with his dean’s rebuke.
Haber, while seemingly random and confused in choosing which of his narrator’s thoughts lead to which others, is actually impressively in control of the novel’s sequences that reveal a fragmented mind wrestling with an interior chaos as he confronts the deepest loss imaginable.