I recently had the privilege of conducting a written interview with author Mark Haber. Haber's novels have earned him recognition as one of contemporary fiction's most distinctive voices. His debut, Reinhardt's Garden (Coffee House Press, 2019), was longlisted for the prestigious PEN/Hemingway Award. His follow-up, Saint Sebastian's Abyss (Coffee House Press, 2022), cemented his reputation, earning spots on both the New York Public Library and Literary Hub's Best Books of 2022 lists. A D.C. native who came of age in Florida, Haber has contributed short fiction to leading literary journals, including Guernica, Southwest Review, and Air/Light. He currently makes his home in Minneapolis, where he continues to craft his singular brand of literary fiction.
In his new novel, Lesser Ruins, Haber offers readers a glimpse into the tangled, often humorous, mind of an unnamed narrator—a grief-stricken Michel de Montaigne scholar overwhelmed by his intellectual pursuits and the incessant distractions of modern life. While Lesser Ruins speaks to lovers of complex, "inscrutable" literature, Haber tells us his writing process is actually quite self-focused: "Write the book you want to read…hopefully the audience will follow."
During our conversation, Haber reflects on balancing humor with serious themes, navigating his influences from Bernhard to Proust, and creating a "tapestry" of real and invented references that ground the narrator's world.
Jonathan Crain: Your writing style has been compared to Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald. Taking this into account, what type of reader did you have in mind when you wrote Lesser Ruins? Did you intend to challenge contemporary reading habits with this novel?
Mark Haber: I don’t have any intentions of challenging the reader’s reading habits or taste. I do however want to introduce something new, influenced by things I already love (and the books that many of my readers love). So I don’t think of an “audience” when I’m writing. I think that’s a bad way to create anything, at least for me. I think artists should be selfish about their work: write the book you want to read, because by being selfish you ultimately create the piece you want and hopefully the audience will follow. No great work was ever created by the artist asking themselves: ‘hmmm, what does the audience want?’ Also, a lot of great art is arbitrary; I may be influenced by a book I pick up randomly or even a commercial I see. And I think writing with an imagined audience can hurt the work.
That being said, I love the idea that books are in conversation with one another. That my work is influenced or speaking to a book by a writer I admire is a huge honor. But I also want my work to be original, not derivative or simply a caricature. So the reader I have in mind is me, truly. But hopefully my selfishness is what ultimately makes the book rewarding.
Jonathan Crain: The narrator of Lesser Ruins is deeply immersed in the world of literature and philosophy, frequently referencing authors like Montaigne, Balzac, Proust, and Pushkin. He also expresses a strong preference for books that are "inscrutable, verging on mystical," and those that require the reader to "meet it halfway" by bringing "the context and imagination." Does this suggest that Lesser Ruins best suits readers who share the narrator's intellectual interests and passion for challenging literature? Are the narrator’s literary tastes reflective of your own? Would you recommend Lesser Ruins to those unfamiliar with these authors and concepts, or would a certain level of prior knowledge enhance the reader's enjoyment?
Mark Haber: I don’t think prior knowledge is required to read my books, although I am similar to the narrator of Lesser Ruins in some ways, and very different in others. The narrator thinks people are lowbrow if they don’t love what he loves and read what he reads; there’s a level of pretentiousness that is intended, often for comic effect. But I’m much more self-aware than my narrator. I also know there’s millions, actually billions, of people on the planet who don’t care about books, or who only read a book every few years. Or people who don’t have the luxury to read because they’re in a war zone or there’s no libraries close by. It’s good to be reminded (and humbled) that what’s the center of your universe or what you care most about doesn’t mean anything to other people. This isn’t the case with the narrator of Lesser Ruins. It’s almost like I’m a filmmaker: when he is having a nervous breakdown in his classroom the camera is closeup - it’s the entire focus of the universe, the world is his mind panicking. But back up a few feet and you see it’s just some obsessed teacher in a classroom in a community college. Context gives the book a lot of humor I hope. Because his world is falling apart in real time and yet there’s a dozen college students yawning and laughing at him a few feet away.
But I was also trying to show the complex nature of a life dedicated to books and literature. It can put someone in touch with ideas, their inner voice, perhaps their own soul. But it can also disconnect you from your fellow humans. It can make you obsessed and myopic. I was attempting, as I did in Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, to show the pros and cons of loving art, but at the expense of everything else.
Many of the books and writers mentioned in Lesser Ruins I haven’t read myself! But I’m trying to create a character who has read them. Often I’m creating characters much smarter and better read than I am.
About the first part of your question, I very much love with the idea of reading things you don’t fully understand. So that’s very autobiographical. Right now I’m reading some short stories by Jorge Luis Borges and often I don’t know exactly what is happening or what Borges is trying to say, but I absolutely love it. It’s making me work a bit and perhaps not find any easy answers. To me there’s something beautiful in that. Great reading should hold an enigma.
Jonathan Crain: Your first novel, Reinhardt's Garden, consisted of one long paragraph, and your second, Saint Sebastian's Abyss, one paragraph per chapter. Lesser Ruins consists of three long paragraphs. It seems that this style, along with the narrator's inclination to shift between unrelated subjects, points to a stream-of-consciousness style of writing. To what extent does your writing in Lesser Ruins match the characteristics of stream-of-consciousness or did you employ a more structured approach when writing it?
Mark Haber: The writing in all three of my books is very stream-of-consciousness, but I’ve said this before: although it’s considered a “style” it’s also how our brains work naturally. We’re always thinking of a few things at once. Or we walk into a room to do something and ten minutes later we’re in the same room but doing something completely different. I think with the internet and digital culture it’s only gotten more pronounced. Our brains are running constantly, jumping from the news to cat videos to a funny video on TikTok. So yes, I lean into that style, but more because I love language and I want the sentences to flow and find strange avenues and places as well as capture the momentum of human thought.
Jonathan Crain: Despite his intellectual leanings, the narrator of Lesser Ruins also exhibits a dry, self-deprecating humor, often poking fun at his own failings and the absurdities of academia. He satirizes American culture, the pursuit of creative fulfillment, and even the nature of literary criticism. Would you say that Lesser Ruins, despite its weighty subject matter, is also a humorous novel? What kind of reader do you think would appreciate its particular brand of humor?
Mark Haber: I do hope it’s funny! I want Lesser Ruins to be seen as a humorous novel. That doesn't mean it isn’t also a serious novel. I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive. I think my books are intended to be funny, satirical and even have a bit of physical comedy. But I’m also deadly serious about it, about books and literature and the themes of my stories. You can have both. Sometimes humorous is looked at as a bad word in “serious literature” but to me that’s silly. I also don’t really attempt to be funny as much as look at the world in a unique way and that vision looks at things or treats everyday things a little bit askew.
And I love the idea that two things can be true at once. He is making fun of American culture, and yet he is a part of American culture. So it’s this idea that we’re all guilty and we’re all a bit accountable for the world we live in.
Jonathan Crain: All of your novels are deeply satirical. In Lesser Ruins, the narrator dismisses most literary critics as writers who "know perhaps how to write but nothing at all about judging or thinking critically about a book." He argues that to determine the value of a literary work, "the last person I would ask would be a writer." Is this statement intended as a satirical jab at the literary establishment? If so, how does this perspective inform your approach to literary criticism and writing?
Mark Haber: Like a lot of the book, I both agree and disagree with what the narrator is saying. When the narrator keeps repeating he entered literature through the “back door” or the “side door”, I was poking fun at academia and especially the MFA culture. To me that culture is very “front door” and unimaginative. And this idea that a person who wants to be a writer so tells themself they’ll naturally attend grad school or an MFA program has always seemed sort of safe and sanitized to me, even self-defeating. Creating literature is not something that can be taught - I don’t believe that. It’s a fire. And a writing program may help the fire or nurture the fire but it can’t create the fire. That’s just my opinion and I’m one person. Certainly great writers attend these programs and great writers teach at these programs, but it always seemed sort of “the it culture” when literature, to me, should be writing against or away from “the culture”. My years struggling to be a writer were often while I was waiting tables at Chili’s or working at a bed & breakfast, and a part of me is extremely proud of that.
Jonathan Crain: It has been suggested that Thomas Bernhard and W.G. Sebald influenced your style in Lesser Ruins. Marcel Proust is another author recognized for his extended, intricate sentences. Were you thinking of these or other authors as you created the distinct voice and style of Lesser Ruins? Are there other writers or thinkers whose work may have shaped the novel's approach to form and narration? You were a bookseller before becoming an author; did your exposure to a wide range of literary styles affect your writing?
Mark Haber: All of these writers are huge influences and I admire and love their work. The most important thing for me is the voice. Once I have the voice I’m off and running. My books are very voice-driven and plot or story comes later. These authors, Bernhard especially, have very voice-driven books, where the nature of the novel, it’s personality and character, comes from the voice telling the story.
I did often imagine Proust’s long narratives or the books of Krasznahorkai or Sebald when writing Lesser Ruins, but a difference in my books is the amount of incident. Things happen. Of course there’s long meditations and digressions and certainly the narrator philosophizing about things, but I mix this with lots of hijinx and incident. at least that’s my goal. I want a very solemn, long serious narrative, dashed with a bit of absurd comedy, like a Coen Brothers film.
Jonathan Crain: The narrator in Lesser Ruins is "consumed by his desire to write a book-length essay on Montaigne, "while his son, Marcel, is "obsessed with electronic dance music." Marcel explains that a good house song uses "samples" to "give a shade, a color, an ingredient that wouldn’t exist without it, the sample expressing what the song itself cannot, the song in fact a skeleton without the sample." He also says the sample acts as both a "perversion" and a "deification" of the source material. Marcel's description of musical sampling seems to echo literary concepts like intertextuality and allusion, a type of “literary sampling” if you will. Did this idea of creatively incorporating and transforming influences feature in your writing process for Lesser Ruins? How does the novel engage with or reimagine its literary influences?
Mark Haber: That’s a great question and not something I thought of while writing the book, but yes, in many ways, the way I approach writing is similar to the way Marcel sees music: sampling, inhabiting, making it your own. I think when you’re a younger writer you’re meant to imitate, to take what you love and copy it. If you do this long enough you develop your own sense of what you like and dislike, what your strengths and weaknesses are, and most importantly, what you care about. It’s also the way a writer develops their style. I imagine the same is true with painters and musicians: you copy the classics, you play their songs or paint their works and through this act of interpretation or emulation, you find yourself.
Jonathan Crain: Lesser Ruins contains numerous references to authors, philosophers, artists, and musicians, reflecting the narrator's deep engagement with art and culture. I attempted to count them and ended up stopping at seventy-five. To what extent does this reflect your own engagement with art and culture?
Mark Haber: Wow! Seventy-five! That’s a lot! I often use the word “tapestry” when talking or writing about my work. I love a work to speaks to other works, that addresses the world of other books and writers. It’s simply something that’s appealing to me. And stating the obvious: I love fiction, of inventing things. So I invented lots of DJs and musicians, as well as a few writers for Lesser Ruins. I love that complex tapestry of the real and the imagined sitting beside one another. It’s really an aesthetic choice. And you have the fictional books written by the art critics in Saint Sebastian's Abyss as well as all the titles for a potential book in Lesser Ruins, a book that is never written, but somehow lives in the reader.
Jonathan Crain: Last question: are you a musician or fan of electronic dance music, or did you just do a deep dive to educate yourself for writing this novel?
Mark Haber: I am not a musician, but I do love electronic music. I also love alternative and 90’s hip-hop and really dozens of other genres, roots Reggae, dub, etc, but electronic music, especially house music, seemed like a genre ripe with possibility for writing about. There’s so many genres and microgenres. Also, there’s dozens of definitions for house music and what it means to people. Did it come from New York? Detroit? Chicago? Germany? Also, like literature, you can have a dance song from Seoul or Buenos Aires that will be immediately understandable to a listener in Munich or Dublin, so there’s this barrier that’s crossed with music, and the same happens (albeit often with translation) for books.
I educated myself by reading a lot of music criticism, especially websites like Resident Advisor, Pitchfork and others. There’s some amazing writing about dance music nowadays.
Throughout our conversation, Haber emerges as an author who wholeheartedly embraces complexity and contradiction. His novels delve into philosophical and literary traditions yet remain grounded in humor and human vulnerability. Like his earlier works, Lesser Ruins weaves a rich tapestry of real and imagined references, reflecting how we process information in a hyperconnected age. His approach to writing—selfish yet sincere, experimental yet accessible—reveals that even in our fragmented modern world, literature can still offer both intellectual challenge and genuine pleasure.