How does one fight the cold apathy of winter?
Published: 2010
Genre: Fantasy, Magic Realism
CW: Kidnapping, Child Death, Animal Death, Drowning, Hanging, Body Horror
★★★☆☆ (⅗)
In Shane Jones’s debut novel Light Boxes, a small town is cursed with eternal winter by a jealous spirit named February, who bans everything related to flight, from books about birds to kites and hot air balloons. When several of the town’s children disappear, a group of former balloonists known as The Solution convinces one of the grieving fathers, Thaddeus Lowe, to help them lead a war against February.
What most readers will take away from this novel is Jones’s experimental writing and formatting. Various fonts and font sizes are employed to add emphasis or indicate that a certain character is speaking. This adds an extra layer of personality to the text, which is already brimming with wild imagery. From underground tunnels built by lost children to moss devouring horses from the inside out to the kites and balloons Thaddeus and his wife Selah paint on their daughter’s arms as a reminder of the warmer days.
With such an experimental style, however, problems are bound to arise. The novel constantly shifts between character monologues and regular narration, and it’s obvious that Jones thrives with writing the former more than the latter. When regular narration occurs, there is much more telling of what happens than when the characters explain for themselves. It also makes it harder to tell when the imagery described is meant to be taken literally; at one point, the text mentions a grizzly bear putting on a deerskin coat to fight the cold, but at no other point in the story do animals display this level of anthropomorphism.
Jones also doesn’t seem interested in most of his female characters, as two out of the four are supposedly killed off to give Thaddeus motivation and another is literally named “Housewife.” Granted, this could be taken as Jones drawing from fairy tale tropes, such as simple, identifiable characters, to give the story a more timeless air, which it generally benefits from. That timelessness, however, is quickly dashed when February ends up writing the following note, which quickly dates the story:
Lists of Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness
1. Italo Calvino
2. Gabriel García Márquez
3. Jim Henson and Jorge Luis Borges—Labyrinths
4. The creator of MySpace
5. Richard Brautigan
6. J. K. Rowling
7. The inventor of the children’s toy Lite-Brite
8. Ann Sexton
9. David Foster Wallace
10. Gauguin and the Caribbean
11. Charles Schulz
12. Liam Rector
In addition, while there are few straightforward answers presented in the novel, the story does take a metafictional turn to suggest what is potentially going on, and it really does a disservice. I remember raising my eyebrow once I reached the page in question and thinking, “Really? This is where we’re going?”
Despite my criticisms, I did enjoy the book’s fairy tale logic. And I admire that Jones took such a risk with his debut novel by going with such an experimental form. Most authors would probably play it safe with their first book and wait until they had a more stable foundation before experimenting with style. I find that quite courageous of him to put himself out there. I’m interested in seeing how his writing must have evolved in his later works.
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