From the author of Reinhardts Garden and Saint Sebastians Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsessionamp160Bereft after the death of his ailing wife a retired professor has resumed his lifes worka book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his wayamp8212from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his sons relentless desire to make an electronic dance albumAs he sifts through the contents of his desk his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine ghosts and grievances spill out across the page From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists colony in the Berkshires from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art the professors memories churn with sculptors poets painters and inventors all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselvesLaced with humor as acrid as it is absurd Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition grief and humanitys ecstatic agonizing search for meaning through art
