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{"id":1813,"date":"2019-10-27T09:45:40","date_gmt":"2019-10-27T09:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/?p=1813"},"modified":"2019-10-27T09:47:31","modified_gmt":"2019-10-27T09:47:31","slug":"lone-star-review-reinhardts-garden-mark-haber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonestar.a1professionals.net\/?p=1813&lang=ar","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Review: REINHARDT’S GARDEN by Mark Haber"},"content":{"rendered":"

A review of Reinhardt’s Garden<\/em>, debut novel from Brazos Bookstore’s Mark Haber<\/p>\n

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This is an important book, and it\u2019s important readers realize that going in. The story isn\u2019t easy, but the prose is more than rewarding. Let me explain.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cProse is architecture,\u201d Hemingway said, \u201cnot interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.\u201d Therein lies the rub with Mark Haber\u2019s Reinhardt\u2019s Garden<\/a><\/em><\/strong>: it\u2019s all interiority, a circular, strangling, spiral of tightening thought in a single one-hundred-and-fifty-page paragraph without a breath, much less the light or heat or elbow room of visceral space or conventional narrative sweep.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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There are flecks of artistic brilliance and tones of an anguished Saul Bellow monologue (think Some Die of Heartbreak<\/em>) or the mid-career textual experiments of Phillip Roth. There\u2019s also the narrative resistance of Zadie Smith, the outright defiance of Cormac McCarthy, or the skeletal blasphemy of Hemingway\u2019s A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.<\/em> Still, none of them claimed the liberty of filibuster to the extent of Jacov Reinhardt\u2019s faithful assistant, Haber\u2019s faceless straw man, in a nonstop rant.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Nonetheless, there is a strange, beautiful aesthetic in the spun thread of tightly, smoothly laminated prose. Not since Algernon Swinburne\u2019s nineteenth-century polar poetics has there been a more measured, metrical pairing of opposites layered in description, leaving the reader to discern a heartbeat in the fleeting, aesthetic structures of weak and strong, young and old, beautiful and hideous, saintly and sinful. To accomplish this art in narration, and Haber has, is masterful, touching on genius. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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The comedy\u2014and we have to assume Haber intends episodic, reflective comedy\u2014is at first Archie Bunker burlesque, but in the single-note chord that is monologue, the framework becomes oppressive, and the repeat pattern in the ever-tightening narrative weave can\u2019t lift the \u201chumor\u201d above repetitive meanness. Reinhardt hates everyone based on his perception of otherness and has a condescending, ignorant hate of cultural\u2014even regional\u2014differences. That\u2019s the unifying, contradictory undertow of Reinhardt\u2019s Garden<\/em>: the journey of \u201cdiscovery\u201d as bus tour of intolerance. At each stop, it gets harder and harder to laugh at the joke.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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That\u2019s where the Swinburnian binary framework re-emerges, as Haber leaves the reader to sense the middle ground between Jacov\u2019s contempt and the narrator\u2019s unwitting, unthinking experience of the people and places Reinhardt scornfully dismisses. What Swinburne accomplished incomparably in poetry, Haber achieves admirably well in prose. That, for the reader, creates another ultimatum: submit to the whirlpool, go with the torrent, and find the middle passage\u2014or drown in the prose. There is an aesthetic reward for the reader, but it\u2019s hard won and by the halfway mark, with much more uphill to go, an uncertain endeavor.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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Which returns us to Hemingway\u2019s Baroque. Haber sets Reinhardt\u2019s Garden<\/em> in early post-modernist 1907, hard on the heels of fin de si\u00e8cle<\/em> (end-of-the-century, Y2K-ish angst) stress after the nineteenth-century industrial dehumanization of the common man. The world surfed a rising tide of great minds sorting great thoughts to save humankind and ensure world peace. No one knew better than Hemingway how magnificently that particular intellectual Baroque failed. A hundred and twelve years later, Haber dusts off \u201cmelancholy\u201d and now it\u2019s kitschy, but is that enough? The reader must decide. <\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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There\u2019s much to like in <\/em>this story, though much to endure. There are sparks of brilliance in the tonnage of dark freight to be sorted. Through the black-hole density emerge slivers of color and light. If these last three sentences\u2014binaries\u2014widen your vision and hone your anticipation, you\u2019re ready for Reinhardt\u2019s Garden<\/em>. It\u2019s troublesome, troubling, resistant, contagious, and rewarding\u2014all at once. That\u2019s worth a read.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

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