ADA

The ruler of a central European backwater awaits a romantic visitor.

Haber specializes in wry, taut, intellectual historical fiction featuring accomplished if deeply flawed male narrators. Here, that’s Gerard Desacroux IV, the son of a dead French nobleman who’s been exiled to Berchtesgaden, “a lump of land tottering between Bavaria and Saxony.” Gerard’s opinion regarding his geographical location is just the start of his bottomless apathy and contempt. Leadership largely means keeping the locals at bay (a bell-ringing sequence informs him if an uprising is in the offing), and the perks of royalty are clouded by paranoia. (He has a series of food tasters ready to monitor potential poisonings.) Where is the joy for a man stationed in a place where winter is “greedily devouring ten months of the year with the remaining two left for mud and disease”? A woman, Ada, with whom he once had a brief fling in Paris. He believes she is coming to visit—alas, with a husband, inheritor of a fortune in the paisley-design business. Though the setting is the 18th century, on the last legs of the Holy Roman Empire, Gerard’s character is amusingly, thoroughly applicable to any era—he is the quintessential failson, incompetent yet constantly fuming at everybody else’s inability to measure up. Though this is a short novel, his ignorance seems bottomless: He respects books for their aesthetic value, not their contents, and scoffs at the idea of a musket when it’s described to him. The novel is formatted as one paragraph, which accentuates the constrained, frustrated tone, with Gerard condemned to jabbering about his romantic desperation and life in a “bleak morass with generations of unrest due to plague, famine, and vague religious feuds.” His ignorance is comic, but Haber tunes the humor carefully; after all, his narcissist narrator is a man in power.

A sharp, taut portrait of curdled, angry leadership.