Reviewed by D. W. White

Art is a tricky thing. Unlike other fields—the hard sciences, medicine and law, even fellow humanities—there is a fundamental subjectivity that warps all discussion, contemplation, and execution of any artistic endeavor. There seem to be universal truths—that this painting is bad, or this book good; that this technique is sound for this situation but that method is disastrous for that idea. But the sorting out of these principles, the defining and the refining of the tenants, bylaws, and regulations of any art form is a perilous, hazy undertaking. All this is important background information to the fact that there are perhaps no people anywhere as sure of their opinions as are the art critics—the evaluators of painting, the appraisers of albums, the reviewers of books. This is the absurd, humorous, and self-serious state of affairs that Mark Haber explores and exposes with originality and skill in Saint Sebastian's Abyss.

The book is built upon a deceptively simple conceit. Our narrator is a discursive first-person who, in something of a via media between conventional and contemporary trends in the novel, sticks to the past tense but declines to give his name. He does, however, like to talk about his work. He is something of a sensation in the academic-critical world, having been one of the co-re-discoverers of a vagabond sixteenth-century Dutch Renaissance painter named Count Hugo Beckenbauer and his transcendent masterpiece, Saint Sebastian's Abyss. The co in the previous sentence forms the crux of the novel—our hero, while a disaffected undergraduate at Oxford, became friends with the mercurial Schmidt, with whom he then uncovered the forgotten painting in the dusty pages of a textbook. Looking back some time later—perhaps three or four decades, it seems—the narrator tells us how he and Schmidt catapulted into superstardom in the arthouse world, les deux writing book after book on sundry details of the small painting, weighty tomes evaluating the blended shadows of an apocalyptic sky or the enigmatic gaze of the "holy donkey"—an apparently biblically stoic ungulate who features prominently in the work's foreground. However, the duo suffered a bitter falling-out over a mysterious comment made by the narrator, turning their once-meteoric partnership into a petty war waged in interpretation of brushstrokes and scathing essay.

Our protagonist, reflecting years after the start of hostilities, gets his inciting incident in the form of an email from Schmidt. It seems his old friend is on his deathbed in Berlin, and the narrator is compelled to go and see him one last time. This, then, is the core of the novel's plot progression—the narrator's journey from his home in the United States to Schmidt's confinement in Germany. Sensibly structured in short, quick chapters, Saint Sebastian's Abyss deals largely in the past, as a playful critique of art criticism and a poignant study of the perils of ambition and the bonds of friendship that emerges along the way. We are told copious amounts of detail about the painting itself and Beckenbauer, whose own sordid life as a sex-addicted, syphilitic, nomadic painter-for-hire is woven in neatly to our narrator's story. The lighting pace and precise prose keep the book from ever feeling weighed down or overloaded, resulting in a remarkably readable work of density and propulsion.

This balance is mainly struck by Haber's use of repetition, which is the defining technical maneuver in the novel. Our narrator goes over the same ground again and again, giving the plot a dancelike movement of circular progression. Haber's mastery of his hero's voice, however, is more than enough to make the approach effective, full of intentionality and humor. An early example is illustrative, in which the narrator is discussing other works he and Schmidt admire, despite none of them being the greatest painting in the history of humanity:

My favorite painting after Saint Sebastian's Abyss is The Conversion of Saint Paul by Caravaggio. Schmidt enjoyed ridiculing my second favorite painting, comparing his second favorite painting, Minerva Victorious over Ignorance, to my second favorite painting, explaining why his second favorite painting was superior to my second favorite painting. Schmidt called Caravaggio melodramatic. Schmidt accused me of fetishizing and dimensionalizing Caravaggio. Schmidt said he well understood why Caravaggio would appeal to someone like me, an incurious American toddler nursed on the teats of an illiterate culture.

The repetition brings to mind both the delicate brushstrokes of the painter and the endless revision of the writer-critic, and Saint Sebastian's Abyss is a fine example of how narrative and textual functions—the book operating as a series of fictive events and the book operating as a constructed piece of art—can be achieved efficiently and elegantly. The novel is a supremely efficient one, not only in its ability to tell a lifelong story in a hundred and fifty pages, but in the number of ways it serves as playful satire, serious critique, and reflective examination of so many aspects of art, criticism, and academia.

The utter conviction with which the narrator and especially Schmidt hold their opinions is deftly rendered by Haber, in a sublime example of an authorial connection to the reader behind the back, so to speak, of a first-person narrator. When our protagonist distills his and Schmidt's artistic worldview, the parodic invocation of criticism writ large is at once both subtle and striking:

Schmidt and I often visited museums where Schmidt would click his tongue violently at the modern art. Schmidt didn't approve of modern art but enjoyed clicking his tongue violently at modern art. Schmidt would famously say that painting almost died in 1528 with the death of Matthias Grünewald but was saved by Early Netherlandish painting, Dutch Mannerism, and the Renaissance. Art most assuredly died once and for all, he'd say, in 1906 with the death of Cézanne. In 1906 painting died once and for all, he'd proclaim, it nearly died in 1528 but was resuscitated, heaving and disfigured, to be salvaged and reclaimed by Early Netherlandish painting, Dutch Mannerism, and the Renaissance. It survived, indeed, thrived, he'd explain to me as well as anyone in proximity, through the baroque and further, until Cézanne's death in 1906. Everything that came after was either not art or worse, trash.

There is something of Ignatius J. Reilly, John Kennedy Toole's bombastic moralizer crusading through A Confederacy of Dunces, in Schmidt, whose ironclad opinions eventually drive him and his erstwhile compatriot apart. And although Saint Sebastian's Abyss—with its minimal fictive present plot and rather loquacious narrator—is a sharp, psychologically resonant, interior-driven work, Haber nonetheless manages to create authentic plot-driven tension as our protagonist builds towards his final confrontation with Schmidt. Much like Toole's own masterpiece, the poignancy and emotional depth slip into Saint Sebastian's Abyss without the reader always noticing, layering this scathing and precise book with the depth of the type of humanity only found in the best art—or, naturally, the best criticism.