How This Style Works: Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber

Man, this novel. Published by the mighty Coffee House Press in 2024, Lesser Ruins by Mark Haber is about a widowed and (forcibly) retired professor plunging himself into a book-length essay about Michel de Montaigne, his life’s work and a less-than-convenient means of avoiding both his grief and also that of his son, Marcel, an aspiring DJ and EDM producer.

What that synopsis doesn’t reveal is how hysterically funny this book is. With almost no plot developments to speak of, it’s a stream-of-consciousness rip through the mind of a roundly isolated intellectual, and what makes it work so well isn’t just the tumult of striking insights but also how they’re packaged in skeins of discursive sentences, like this one right here, with the parts we’ll talk about in bold (the italics are in the original):

And the chirp of the phone once again removes me from these reveries, the coffee no longer warm, the tangle of gaping pages like discarded relics, and I’m certain the chirp is notifying me of another voicemail, someone concerned with my state of mind, meaning my well-being, and there were no phones in Montaigne’s life, I’m reminded, hence no voicemails, hence no intrusion on long swathes of undisturbed time, and I wonder if it’s Marcel because Marcel’s voicemails are extraordinary, some lasting well over ten minutes where Marcel, accompanied by the distant clamor of his roommates, dispenses muddled soliloquies on the culture of dance music and turntablism as well as the vibrant tenacity of dub.

That’s actually one of the shorter sentences, but it prominently features a rhythmic device that Haber uses throughout the novel: the absolute phrase. Definitions do vary, but most agree that absolutes are composed of a noun plus a participle (e.g., “the needle having dropped”) or modifier (e.g., “the dog coarse”). What’s interesting is that these little guys are contained units that don’t attach to the rest of the sentence in a clear syntactic way.    

In our example, Haber uses four of them, and they’re interesting not just because of the richness arising from their meaning but also because of how they deter what would otherwise be a lot of chop arising from the conjunctions necessary to string together so many dependent and independent clauses. Without them, we’d get this:

And the chirp of the phone once again removes me from these reveries, and I’m certain the chirp is notifying me of another voicemail, and there were no phones in Montaigne’s life, I’m reminded, hence no voicemails, hence no intrusion on long swathes of undisturbed time, and I wonder if it’s Marcel because Marcel’s voicemails are extraordinary, where Marcel, accompanied by the distant clamor of his roommates, dispenses muddled soliloquies on the culture of dance music and turntablism as well as the vibrant tenacity of dub.

See the difference? Notice that I removed “meaning my well-being,” but it’s not technically an absolute; rather, it’s a complement to “someone concerned with my state of mind,” so I had to slice them both away to make the point, which is that without absolutes, the rhythm is almost annoying, one clause stumbling off of the next like it was getting tossed off the porch of a backwoods biker bar. The absolutes give us a bit of padding, and when Haber’s aesthetic really pops off, some sentences spanning hundreds of words, the device is all the more useful. And of course, the guy’s brilliant, so each use is rich with meaning as well.

Absolutes aren’t the only tool he uses, but does he ever use them to full effect. Anyone interested in cranking out a similar aesthetic would do well to make a study of this phenomenal book.