Magnificent Obsessions

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

In the “Acknowledgments” to Magnificent Obsessions, Choyce dedicates
his latest work of humor to “all the many friends and strangers who
have led genuine lives different from what appear in these pages. This
narrative remains credible, however, because of my belief that we exist
in a world of multi-faceted potential lives that exist for each of us
beyond the single time line that carries us from birth to death.” This
book carries on the zany tradition established in his An Avalance of
Ocean. A long-time resident of Halifax (by way of New Jersey), Choyce
has written nearly 20 books; he currently teaches at Dalhousie and hosts
a television talk show.

What is a “photonovel”? A new genre? Hardly. What Choyce has
concocted is a collection of old photographs, one of which appears at
the head of each brief chapter. The photograph serves as a point of
departure for the text that follows. These pictures (ostensibly taken by
the narrator) are of friends, family members, objects. What they have in
common is that the book could not exist without them. Choyce has
ingeniously molded his very funny book around these photos in much the
same way that Victorian novelists used lengthy chapter headings to whet
the reader’s interest. Each stage of the hero’s life is introduced
graphically, then explicated textually; the resulting mix is both
whimsical and bizarre. Recommended for public libraries.