A*hole

Hilton Obenzinger's experimental novel "A*Hole" is a magic realism ride with multifaceted voices challenging and seducing the reader to patch together the mysterious events, philosophical puzzles and good old story telling into a surprisingly lucid experience. This book gives you a glimpse of how the creative mind works.

A fantastic page-turner that's over too soon! Obenzinger weaves a tale of lives that intersect as they slide along their personal planes and slippery slopes of existence. Some collide, some barely brush past, yet none leaves the other unaffected. Each brief episode creates strong characters we respond to with a range of feelings from loving concern to visceral repulsion. Before long, I found myself racing through, eager to find out what further connections would be revealed. Such revelations make a whole of the parts, and create a story that moves in many directions in time and space without once leaving the reader behind. An exhilarating trip!

Obenzinger is that rare combination of novelist, narrative historian, and social commentator who weaves a captivating and relevant story. This hip blend of prose and a sprinkling of meta-poetry (generated in command line interface interludes that really do serve to punch things along) is a milestone on the order of Breton's "Nadja". Think James Joyce meets Tom Waits and Charles Bukowski. Really! He combines mythical parent-child musings with portraits of a cyber-Skid Row, the Philippine origins of a sect that worships the Nike "swoosh" logo, the journey of Danny DeVito on the cusp of a physical labyrinth, and religious metaphors that manage to encompass Jonah and Jeffrey Dahmer in a visceral counterpart to Dante's Inferno. Here is a deftly told tale that continues Obenzinger's expert use of the unreliable narrator that I first observed in his estimable work "Cannibal Eliot and the Lost Histories of San Francisco", which I also heartily recommend (there is even another girl embedded in a wall). Mark Twain's America has been updated with observations informed by Obenzinger's real-life stint teaching the Yurok Indians. He is the ultimate meta-narrator, who jumps in and out of his own story with startling ease and grace as he sows and then reaps a matrix of clues, symbolic associations, and point of view shifts that somehow make perfect sense. Behind these supple movements is the weight of a Stanford professor of American studies, Obenzinger's "other" job, where he ponders notions of Judeo-Christian paradigms with an original brand of scholarship. I literally felt I wanted to scan this book into a text file so I could run searches on it, surely the type of symbolic crossword that already exists in the author's mind. A must read, and a great story.