The Price of Obsession: On Mark Haber’s “Ada”

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Ada, the latest novel from Mark Haber, begins at a frantic pitch. The narrator, Haber’s latest in a series of misanthropes, outcasts, and recluses, paces his castle, waiting for his henchmen to bring word of an expected visitor. Simmering tensions in the local peasantry threaten to boil over into outright revolt just outside his walls, but they are merely a pesky distraction from the carriage he anticipates. So worried is he with espying his visitors that he has had constructed, demolished, and reconstructed a watchtower umpteen times in an effort to do so with the greatest alacrity. “Obsessed” does not quite do it justice.

Ada is composed as one long paragraph, a monologue from the perspective of Gerard Desacroux IV. Gerard is a foreign prince and the heir to a minor kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire at the dawn of the age of gunpowder. When his father meets his maker at the end of a cannon, Gerard is awarded his inheritance. Ruling suited the father, much less the son. Of greater interest are women and lustful dalliances with them in the backstreets of Paris. The last of these women was Ada, his first great love for whom he pines and from whom he has been separated by the cumbersome duty of ruling. The intervening years have not dimmed his ardor, and she has finally accepted his invitation to his palace. 

Their reunion is complicated by the small problem of Ada’s husband, Ehrhart. He has wisely chosen to accompany his wife on the trip to Gerard’s castle and is already suspicious, having intercepted several of Gerard’s lewd letters. Ehrhart is the heir to a thriving garment business, his uncle the inventor of the paisley pattern, “that celebrated pattern which each day grows in popularity, sewn ubiquitously into corsets and rugs and endless tapestries, the paisley pattern literally everywhere one looks, so much so I have trouble imagining the enormity of wealth generated by the paisley design.” Ehrhart is a model rising bourgeois, shouldering his way into the company of the aristocracy gripping two fistfuls of cash. His usurpation of Gerard in Ada’s heart inspires both hatred and jealousy: “What I wouldn’t give to have a paisley inheritance, I think, the paisley wealth from the paisley design with none of the attachments of the throne, growing furious picturing the enormity of Ehrhart’s paisley fortune as well as the countless ways he must have utilized it in order to court Ada.”

Modernity baffles and enrages Gerard: not only the nouveau riche upstarts such as Ehrhart, but modern technology, too. Looking to boost his approval rating with the locals, he concocted a patriotic war out of thin air only to see his makeshift conscript army of cowherds and dirt farmers annihilated by the enemy wielding a new-fangled weapon called a musket. When he finally gets his hands on a specimen of this new weapon, he cannot help but find himself confused: “This, I say, this, I repeat with an incredulousness which can’t be confused with anything but rage, disbelief and mounting fury. This is responsible for the massacre of your brethren, I ask. This little cannon?” It does not occur to him to equip his soldiers with the latest in martial technology because he is simply not very curious about or interested in the future, wholly obsessed as he is with Ada. Modernity, bearing down on him, produces only confusion and fear. He finds succor in an armory closet where he titillates himself frequently, reliving his last night in Ada’s bed.

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Gerard is the latest in a series of reactionaries who populate Haber’s work: the cocaine-fueled Jacov of Reinhardt’s Garden (2019); the snobbish Schmidt of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss (2022); the bitter unnamed narrator of Lesser Ruins (2024). The characters in Haber’s fiction are repulsed by the modern world, flinching backwards toward the past. The two art critics at the center of Saint Sebastian’s Abyss dedicated their lives to the sixteenth-century painter Count Hugo Beckenbauer; the narrator of Lesser Ruins is a Montaigne scholar, constantly blaming his smartphone for distracting him from his life’s work; Jacov, of Reinhardt’s Garden, snorts cocaine and blasts Wagner. What they like about the Early Modern period is, ironically, what makes it such a break from what came before and the ways in which it contains the seeds of our present: the invention of the essay, Dutch Golden Age painting, and the Reformation were seismic changes that upset the status quo. Looking around them, Haber’s protagonists find a benighted age. They believe they have found in the past a more sophisticated time, when reason triumphed over superstition and artistry came into its own.

The intertextual irony here is that Gerard’s present is these characters’ golden past, his strange new world their halcyon days. He is as ill at ease in his modernity as his predecessors are in theirs. In Lesser Ruins, the novel that immediately precedes Ada, the dark, tragicomic types of Reinhardt’s Garden and Saint Sebastian’s Abyss are deepened, refined, and treated with pity, if not kindness. Ada, on the other hand, is Haber’s themes distilled into a purified form and taken to cartoonish heights. It is the shortest novel he has written and it eliminates the mediating distance of time which had separated his characters from the refuge of the past. Instead of paradise, we find a world where hapless peasants are told to grab whatever farm tool can best serve as a weapon and are shipped off to die in a compulsive masturbator’s war of choice. All of Haber’s protagonists are burning inside the crucible of their particular modernity, fighting spasmodically against the desecration of a past that appears as a hologram, as perfect as it is immaterial. 

One aspect of the new age that particularly vexes these characters is books. Books function in the novels as oneiric avatars of modernity, ensnaring lost souls. Jacov hates literature; the narrator of Lesser Ruins is besotted with it:

“…because literature, I always thought, was a wordless prayer, even though it’s made up entirely of words, I thought, still, it’s more akin to a wordless prayer, to transcendence and euphoria or, if not euphoria, then at least the pursuit of euphoria, yes, literature the earthly attempt of attaining these things and the beauty isn’t in the attainment (which is impossible) but the pursuit of the attainment, the moment which dissolves as soon as you, meaning the reader, devour the words and are touched, yes…”

Gerard is neither obsessed with nor hates books, finding a wary remove the best posture to adopt. His bibliophilic grandfather assembled the family library, filling it with tomes since grown dusty. His Jacov-esque father hated books and found them worse than useless: “books and ideas mere exercises in frivolity, gestures in arrogance and vanity, because it’s contraptions like the weapon you fired that bend the arc of the world and shape history, violence which ultimately triumphs; immediate, unassailable, cause and effect, the musket, yes?” Gerard finds them most useful seen but not read: “And I touch the spines of my grandfather’s books, feel a gathering sense of wonder at the radiant colors my grandfather’s books evoke, part of me believing I’ve inherited half my father and half my grandfather, part idiot dreamer, part zealous warrior, both combined and conflicted and forever at war inside…” The three generations of Desacroux men each manifest a different aspect of Don Quixote: Gerard II, his bibliomania; Gerard III, his penchant for battle; Gerard IV, his lovesick devotion to an absent adoree.

Obsession is the governing logic of these characters. There are the bibliophiles, yes, but the object of their obsession can vary, from sex (Jacov, Gerard) to study (Schmidt, the narrator of Lesser Ruins) to drugs (Jacov, the narrator of Lesser Ruins). Obsession is the engine that drives their hatred of the modern and fuels it to a manic intensity. They turn an object over and over in their mind, probing its recesses and peeling back its skin until, by their intimacy, they come to worship it like an icon or hate it like a false idol. The sensual objects of their obsession often derail their pursuit of the intellectual: the narrator of Lesser Ruins pursues the perfect cup of coffee so avidly he has yet to write anything meaningful of what is meant to be his opus; Gerard is too busy fantasizing about Ada, locked in a closet, to bother much with his kingdom teetering on the brink of revolution. Obsession is by one turn the way that these characters achieve their meager success, but it is also, by another, the fatal flaw in their efforts to reach the perfection they seek.

Obsession manifests in the novels as semantic repetition. Haber will use a word or phrase like a leitmotif, often emphasizing it with italics, repeatedly throughout the text. This could be “Hapsburg Inspector General” as in Ada or “smartphone” as in Lesser Ruins. The effect is to produce a sense of fixed mania, the price of obsession. The phrase, which will appear at first encounter to be innocuous, signals the beginning of a spiral that reaches its culminating point at the next repetition of the unmodified phrase. By passing through the interim text, the reader has acquired additional context that deepens and enriches their understanding. The phrase works as a signal of that with which the narrator is obsessed, and each time, like a tolling bell, its repetition thrusts the reader deeper into the pit of mania: 

“I snatch the object, the so-called musket, the contraption supposedly responsible for the elimination of an entire people who are either Saxon or Bavarian, I couldn’t care less, and I turn away, feel the weight of the so-called musket, begin pacing once more, making strides, but not in circles, walking instead in semi-circles, walking in an oval pattern around the Great Room, caressing the object, smelling the object, the so-called musket, the future of warfare I’m told, laughing to myself while pointing the weapon haphazardly at the library, the throne, a taster-in-waiting, waving the so-called musket with careless abandon, laughing uncontrollably, when Hans suddenly reappears. Look, I howl, it’s a so-called musket”!

Ada is at turns wistful, funny, and irate, told in obsessive and recursive monologue recalling the work of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. Haber has previously cited both Bernhard and Roberto Bolaño as influences, and the novels read as Bernhard’s screeds populated by Bolano’s misfits and losers, particularly in their sexual hang-ups. Haber’s work is more outlandish than either and possesses a slapstick sense of humor not found in Bernhard. It is also less cynical, and where one suspects Bernhard’s narrators are variants of himself, Haber’s narrators, like the hapless and horny Gerard, are being set up. Their foibles are highlighted and their cynicism is defanged. Haber’s work evinces a love of literature qua human expression that precludes the kind of choking nihilism in Bernhard. Characters in Haber’s work generally either love literature or find it a detestable waste of time, but the former are treated with more sympathy than the latter.

Haber’s novels are case studies in mania, obsession, and misanthropy. Their characters are so sure of their rightness and so wounded by the world’s slights that they have tipped over into madness. The modern world confuses and enrages them, so they worship the past. In our time, when the reactionary ache throbs with increasing strength, this turn backwards takes on a thoroughly modern character. Ada shows us that their golden age—and perhaps any so-called golden age—was once a reactionary’s blasted modernity. In a stream of epithets, complaints, and carnal fixation, Haber’s protagonists lash out at a world that turns more hostile to them each day. As the walls close in on Gerard Desacroux IV, so too on the reader; we are with him until the end, as his spinning, feverish pacing is brought to a screeching halt.