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Title: Obsessions: A Novel in Parts by Daniel Jones ISBN: 0-920544-87-8 Publisher: Mercury Press Pub. Date: September, 1992 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $9.95

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Average Customer Rating: 1 (1 review)

Rating: 1
Summary: "incomprehensible and monstrous"
Comment:

Subtitled "a novel in parts," Daniel Jones' OBSESSIONS is disjointed, nightmarish and ultimately disappointing. Told in the second person, the book drags "You," the reader, afflicted with an unusually full spectrum of phobias and psychological disorders, on an agonizing scatological journey to nowhere in particular.

Heavily laden with images aimed to shock and disgust -- which are too often successful in this regard -- what OBSESSIONS lacks is a sense of purpose, of higher design. The narrative is out-of-control, spasmodic, with no discernible organization. Passages of the book read aloud are met with gales of laughter, shudders of disdain and general condemnation. It begins with madness and proceeds only into greater depths of dementia. Perhaps that is the point of Jones' writing here: to know the utter abandon of the insane. Nonetheless, the incessant stream of hallucinations, bodily fluids and decomposing refuse through which one is forced to wade wearily results in a defensive rejection. Barren of insight, of a guide to how one came to arrive in this state of total disintegration, OBSESSIONS fails to deliver beyond revulsion.

The word "fuck" and/or variants thereof is repeated twelve times in three lines of text on page 74. This is not unusual. By the time a chapter ends with line, "There are no more words," one wonders if the sophomoric and abjuratory dimensions serve to denote a bankruptcy of imagination. The novelty of the vulgarity, not unlike the uniformly downcast temperament, all too soon wears thin. The reading experience is reduced to once of distanced apathy.

In the end, this is not a novel so much as a series of vignettes. Largely comprised of bits and pieces culled from his short fiction and poetry already published in various magazines, Jones' "novel" leaves one feeling cheated. At a scant 93 pages, and most of those with the text all too obviously spaced to fill, one is struck by a sense of fraud, similar to that of a student essay set in an unusually large font, triple-spaced (but printed on nice paper) to meet the letter, but not the spirit, of an assigned page length. Perhaps Jones envisioned OBSESSIONS as a culmination, a whole greater than the sum of its "parts", yet, rather than a reworking of prior ideas, the book seems a mere vehicle, an unispired excuse to reprint them.

A quotation Jones uses to begin OBSESSIONS, then, most aptly summarizes the book itself: "...without plan, without direction, incomprehensible and monstrous".