Saint Sebastian's abyss

Haber (Reinhardt's Garden) returns with a sharp-witted exploration of friendship, art, and criticism. The unnamed narrator receives an email from his former best friend, Schmidt, after 13 years of estrangement, with the news that Schmidt is on his deathbed in Berlin. The narrator flies to Germany, and what ensues is an examination of their decades-long friendship, initially forged over a mutual fascination with Saint Sebastian's Abyss, a painting of the apocalypse that the two first discovered while students at Oxford. Schmidt and the narrator have since made their careers as art critics based on their insights on the painting and its creator, Count Hugo Beckenbauer. The pair had a devastating falling out after the narrator said something unforgivable, which Schmidt now refers to as "that horrible thing," and in the years since, the two have resorted to petty vendettas as their work turned away from the painting that they both revere and toward disproving each other's theories. Schmidt--heavily mustached, chronically ill, and a staunch holder of harsh beliefs--is a difficult friend but memorable character. Haber intelligently explores how his leads' small-mindedness gets in the way of their higher pursuits, as the narrative zeroes in on an inevitable and surprising conclusion. With this dark comedy of obsession, Haber keeps the Bernhard flame burning. Agent: Danielle Bukowski, Sterling Lord Literistic. (May)

A friendship between two art scholars warps and cracks over an obscure early Renaissance painting. The unnamed American narrator of Haber's careful, fuguelike intellectual satire is convinced that Saint Sebastian's Abyss, a 16th-century painting by Count Hugo Beckenbauer, is a masterpiece. His Austrian colleague, Schmidt, agrees, and since discovering the painting as students at Oxford, they've written 20 books between them celebrating the work. But their reasons for that admiration diverge, and as the narrator heads to Berlin to visit Schmidt on his deathbed, he recalls various reasons for their disagreements. The narrator believes Schmidt has faked his passion for the work as a way to claim ground as a Beckenbauer authority. Schmidt, for his part, believes that the narrator's American background makes him a second-rate intellect. (He likens America to "an obese infant with a concussion.") In time, it becomes clear that the pair's books aren't feats of research so much as salvos in a decadeslong pissing match. Haber deliberately withholds details about the painting itself--we know there's a donkey, a cliffside, rays of light, and apostles, but not enough to sense why the men are so thunderstruck. And in a way, they hardly seem to know themselves. As they squabble over Beckenbauer--to the point of wrecking the narrator's two marriages, he claims--it's increasingly questionable whether the artist was worth the trouble. (The biographical details suggest that he was a sex-obsessed syphilitic whose work, aside from the title painting, was unremarkable.) The recursiveness of the narrator's sentences creates a sense that scholarship is a kind of prison, killing a love of art rather than expanding it. That strategy gives a fussy, mannered quality to the prose, but it does serve the point that obsession can lead to a crushing cynicism. A darkly funny novel about the wages of small-stakes intellectual combat. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.