Imagine living as a regular person in a normal country. Working class, perhaps. Simplicity is a virtue. Except the struggle for day-to-day peace is constantly under threat thanks to a dim-witted, hubristic nepo baby ruling the country who detests education and doesn't care if his subjects live or die. That imbecilic leader is, of course, Gerard Desacroux IV, the narrator at the center of Mark Haber's entertaining new novel, Ada (Coffee House Press; 112 pages).

The novel presents a delightful satire of everything wrong with ruling classes, nepotism, and male narcissism. Both the narrator and his father show a blatant disregard for human life; each starts a war that decimates the peasant population out of boredom. Gerard is obsessed with Ada after their night together, but she’s been married for several years, and likely harbors no feelings for him. He’s willing to kill her husband simply because he thinks he deserves her. He is also completely unfit to lead anybody or anything. His formative years were spent "whoring and drinking" around Paris, and he's only left in charge of a kingdom he detests because his father, himself a complete failure as a leader, bequeathed him the throne. Both father and son are portrayed as moronic leaders capable of setting an entire society back decades, and neither has the slightest shred of humility. Gerard's rambling narration can, at times, show cracks of self-awareness, but overwhelmingly he proudly portrays himself as a monarch with no qualifications who thinks he deserves anything, or any woman, that manifests in his dreams.

Beyond those obvious critiques, the book excels at lampooning the growing war on intellectualism. Gerard notes that both his father and great-grandfather, Gerard I, were noble men, great monarchs, the type who can lead by violence rather than thought. His grandfather (Gerard II), however, opted for a different path. He's often labeled as strange and an outcast for believing more in books than brutality. In the narrator's view, no doubt espoused by his father, it makes Gerard II unfit to carry the Desecroux name:

His grandfather's impressive book collection is displayed prominently in the Great Room, where Gerard spends his days pacing in circles. The collection interests him, but not in the slightest helpful way. He prefers to look at the books, to feel their spines, but not to actually read them, which he considers a task beneath him. It's a keen critique of the way the ruling class in America has waged a brutal war against intellectualism, to disastrous results. It also calls to mind past literary dilettantes, such as Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, who boasted of reading books, 'scientific books' he clearly did not understand. It also evokes real-world displays of anti-intellectualism by public figures who brand academics as out-of-touch elites.

Haber makes an important choice to unmoor the story from a specific time period, because the themes themselves are timeless. We get clues to a relative time, as Gerard declares war against the neighboring Ochsenfurts and the rival country's army slaughters thousands of the local peasants with newly invented muskets. Yet these clues are insignificant enough, adding levity rather than facts, that it's not important to understand the specific time period or setting, nor is it supposed to be. Timelessness is key because it makes a statement about how pointless wars keep repeating. Gerard III's debacle at the Battle of Flanders is repeated by his son when he declares war with the Ochsenfurts. The story satirizes how military blunders born of hubris have recurred in the real world countless times, from the Battle of the Little Bighorn to the Gallipoli campaign to the present, and will continue to do so into the future.

The critiques and absurdity carry plenty of weight, but the real star of the novel is Haber's prose. Told in a single paragraph, with long run-on sentences, it mirrors exactly what's happening with the story: Gerard pacing in circles in his Great Room, ranting to himself in a stream-of-consciousness deluge. Oft-repeated phrases, typically when talking down to a single person or an entire country, give the prose a strong lyrical quality, almost like an absurd epic poem. Repetition risks feeling tired and overdone, and too much of it can cause a reader to check out if it's not handled well. Here, Haber utilizes repetition for style, and the rich prose feels fresh each time. Whenever Gerard talks about the peasants over which he rules, he always calls them "Saxons or Bavarians, Bavarians or Saxons, who even cares . . . " The stream of consciousness and repetition from such a dense leader, with an assist from the unusual structure, also elicit considerable humor. In one such instance, which highlights how nothing seems to be going right for Gerard, he laments his inability to end the war decimating his peasants, as a simple 'my bad' doesn't suffice:

The novel's ranting prose starts off slow but builds momentum like a boulder rolling down a hill. The sharp political satire also touches on adjacent traditional themes of class, gender, and identity. The class divide between the peasants and the aristocracy is ever-present. Ada herself is only seen in flashbacks, and she represents the ways in which people like Gerard often treat women as objects or catalysts rather than as people with their own stories. The reader only gets Gerard’s view of Ada, which highlights the book’s satirical lens on gender and power. And Gerard is portrayed as an obvious example of elites failing upward.

An egomaniacal leader who doesn't care about his own subjects? Check. Senseless conflicts started casually out of boredom? Check. A war on intellectualism that wants to ridicule people who read books? Check. It's easy to draw a parallel between Gerard and our country's current leader. Perhaps Haber isn't intending to satirize one person, but rather to lambast a broader type of male egotist we see everywhere. It shares the biting social insight of recent novels such as Gary Shteyngart's Lake Success and Vera, or Faith, as well as Jason Mott's Hell of a Book. But with a setting so distantly removed from realism, Ada stands alone in how it uses absurdity to make its points, even if it has to stretch further to connect them.

The best satire draws the biggest laughs because, deep down, we know it also holds the deepest truths. Here, both the laughs and the critiques are plenty. Ada is a riot to read, though not the same sort of riot constantly threatening the gates of the Desacroux castle.