Meet Afga Somerset, former James Madison University student and one time promising poet, now a town character getting nowhere in his life, only deeper into his head. But when his best friend is found dead, presumably murdered, Afga becomes the center of a police investigation, and his inner/outer life shifts into high gear.
Meanwhile, long-standing preoccupations continue to haunt Afga's life: his emotional battle over a failed marriage; his ex-wife's new lesbian romance and its impact on her eight year old daughter for whom Afga has become the official baby-sitter; and above all else, the surreal dialogue he conducts with a father who disappeared long ago. All leading to discoveries that solve more than one mystery, while creating a few more.
AFGA is a picaresque novel with serious as well as comic overtones.
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By Vitae Bergman
Oct 15, 2009
"AFGA: Mystery and Revelation, by Anne Fox" Afga, the picaresque hero, lives unashamedly by his own curious reasoning. Because his logic is so unrelentingly circular, his life for the past 16 years has worn the path of a man with one foot staked to the ground, or, in his case, downtown Harrisonburg. He cannot leave his squalid efficiency apartment because the building coincidentally bears both the name and the birthdate of his dead father; self-doubt keeps him from completing volume II of a cycle of poems; he cannot engage any woman in love because his heart still clings to his ex-wife. When the novel opens Afga can't even decide if it is Winter or Spring. What jolts him from his rut is the bizarre shooting death of a co-worker from the hospital where Afga has a menial job. Suddenly, Afga has to deal with a mystery greater than the spirals of (highly amusing) logic in his head. The outside world suddenly raids his insular existence. Now he not only has to wrestle with his... More > inner angst--his failed love, his poetic block, his identity as the son of an unknown father--but with tangible terrors such as sheriffs and shopping malls. (Afga's agonizingly existential encounter with the modern shopping mall will touch anyone appalled by crass commercialization.) In seeking solutions to his multifaceted predicament, Afga re-invents himself, revealing the queer and delightful genius that was there all along. This year, I'm totally besotted by Afga. Anne Fox, editor, Bay Books News< Less
