Mark Haber Makes the Case for Historical Satire
Devyn Andrews
Book Review
A review of Mark Haber’s Ada (Coffee House Press). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.
If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need to be reminded about how social media, AI, short-form content, and/or the decline of literacy all seem to portend the demise of the Novel as an artistic form. And I certainly won’t belabor any too-familiar talking points about the mechanisms behind the novel’s declining popularity here — rather, if you are (still) reading this, I’d like to think that you’re someone who, despite present circumstances, hasn’t given up hope for the novel quite yet. Perhaps you might even believe that the novel’s continual evolution, from serialized broadsheet to .epub with countless stops in between, characterizes it as a living art form whose primary charge is to adapt its reflective capacity as the world changes. (And, if so, you’re in good company here).
I bring up the crisis of the novel in this nominal book review not to further bemoan our shrinking attention spans and declining critical thinking skills, but to highlight the ways in which these critical conversations about the value and the role of literature in contemporary society writ large become particularly acute in the realm of ironic, humorous, and/or satirical writing. On a smaller scale, this increasing surreality of our world—particularly our Western cultural appetite for advertainment, political theatre, and moral posturing— creates interesting dilemmas for writers seeking to leverage the outlandish to comment on the everyday, and even raises questions about the ultimate viability of satire in a neoliberal reality largely driven by market interests and plagued by disinformation and disaffectedness. At its core, the question seems to be: How can the writer of today possibly preempt humanity’s future stupidity enough to effectively satirize it, especially from a position within a world so hell-bent on anti-intellectualism, so addicted to rapidly-cycling spectacle, that the gap between reality and hyperbole has all but closed by the time such a manuscript has even been typeset?
In other words, is it even possible to write satire anymore? And, if the Novel is dead anyway, why should we bother?
One has to imagine some of these questions may have been circling in Mark Haber’s head while working on his latest, Ada, a wildly intelligent romp of a novel that takes a formidable whack at some of literature (and life’s) biggest philosophical problems in just 90 hilarious and erudite pages.
Bearing Haber’s signature wit and attention to voice, Ada transports readers to a fictional version of Berchtesgaden, a remote region in the Alps during the time of the Holy Roman Empire, where we join the gleefully tyrannical autocrat Gerard Desacroux IV on one of his habitual walks around the edges of the “Great Room” of his palace. As Desacroux paces in circles, he obsesses over Ada, a married French woman with whom he has been infatuated since the singular night they spent together in Paris years prior. Ada and her “atrocious husband Ehrhart” are en route to Berchtesgaden for a visit—channeling his anxious energy into haranguing (and occasionally kicking) his palace attendants over various trivial matters, Desacroux revisits memories of his youth in France, contemplates the responsibility of power, and fantasizes about killing Ehrhart as he paces, awaiting the “unbroken peal” of the guard tower bell announcing Ada’s arrival.
Ada is rendered in first-person and is notably devoid of paragraph breaks; and though the novel can be enjoyed in a single sitting, the strength of Haber’s prose and attention to detail on the line level are deserving of a close read. Fans of Haber’s work will recognize the way in which key idiosyncratic phrases appear and reappear throughout the novel in linguistic mechanism somewhat reminiscent of prose poetry. This compositional choice allows Haber to advance his central thematic exploration across his character-driven narrative arcs in a way that both colors the story and allows readers a chance to get in on the joke; in this case, “defensive architecture,” “paisley money,” “so-called muskets,” and “Habsburg Inspector General” are particularly glib Haber-isms that Desacroux repeats throughout the novel, all cumulating into what I can only describe (for fear of spoilers) as an incredible three-word punchline tying all of Desacroux’s loose ends together.
The fact that Ada is so brief yet so richly loaded is a testament to Haber’s skill as both a prose writer and satirist. Desacroux’s bumbling short-sightedness, seemingly random obsessions, and flagrant disregard for his subjects of course offer parallels to the world we find ourselves in today; there are also very faint references to Hitler’s Nazi-era “Eagle’s Nest” retreat (uncoincidentally located on a mountaintop in the real-life Berchtesgaden region) and even Trump’s eternally-under-construction ballroom project. But, to his credit, Haber avoids over-allegorizing or employing symbolism with a heavy hand, allowing the cyclical nature of empire, tyranny, and social unrest to speak for itself.
And for as much as Ada is an investigation into the eternal human propensity towards despotism – “Great and heroic men are as plagued by nonsense as the rest of us” is a particularly ironic realization Desacroux comes to about his own father— it is also perhaps a testament to the ways in which the only certainty in “the world as we know it” is and has always been change. Whereas other, more speculative satire sometimes functions as a warning of worse days to come, Haber’s Ada looks backwards, returning to history in order to better contextualize our present circumstances. The novel’s unforgettable, tragically hopeful-ish conclusion grants readers a satisfying morsel of poetic justice alongside a salient reminder of our place in human history: though it is true that today’s times are in many ways unprecedented, it is also true that millions of people over countless generations before us have likewise lived under—and fought back against—tyranny. Some of them, even, have triumphed.
So, perhaps it is true that the novel and the world are both doomed, in a sense—but if we turn to the past, through art, we might find that we are less alone than we thought we were. I’m sure Haber’s Saxons or Bavarians might agree.
Ada
Mark Haber
Coffee House Press
112pp
$18
Devyn Andrews lives in Chicago and is a graduate of the UIC Program for Writers. An Associate Prose Editor at West Trade Review, her work has been published in L’Esprit Literary Review, Cutthroat, Memezine, and elsewhere. She also holds a master’s degree in public health from Tufts University School of Medicine and currently teaches creative and academic writing courses at Roosevelt University.
L'Esprit Literary Review 