Light Boxes
by Shane Jones

It’s not discombobulating so much as overwhelming. In Shane Jones’s debut novel slash fable slash collection of fragments, February not only refers to a month but also to a man, not only to a man but also to a mental state, not only to a mental state but also to a multitude of other similar metaphors. Often, it’s all of these at once, and the effect is not discombobulating so much as overwhelming.

February—in this sentence or in any of the succeeding sentences or in any of the many sentences in the book that succeed at effecting in the reader simultaneous confusion and amazement, whether the word specifically means a month, a man, a mental state, or a multitude of metaphors, is in the long haul not a matter of utmost import—has outstayed its welcome for at least three hundred days in a town that by Jones’s sporadic direct descriptions appears to be a cross between a Seussian village and a set straight out of a Henry Selick production. The town would have had its “mountains on top of mountains” blanketed with arcadian contentment and its idiosyncratic inhabitants filled with the most simple joy of, among many others, flying kites were it not for February’s cruel decision to overstay. But what’s the deal with February anyway? He wants to stay a while longer, and by “a while” it means three hundred days or more. So what? The town, you see, is also very likely located in the Northern Hemisphere, that part of the world where February is synonymous to winter, and now you see February take on another form: not an entire season so much as a climate, one of cold and darkness, one of gloom and desperation.

If winter is indeed nature’s way of saying, “Up yours,” then in the novel February is practically giving the townspeople the finger. He is something of a meteorological tyrant. He loathes anything that flies and hates the very idea of flying with a passion so burning, obviously from being phenomenally cold, that he wants anything that flies banned and the very idea of flying eliminated. He enlists a band of residents obsequious enough to help him enforce his law: “They confiscated textbooks, tore out pages about birds, flying machines, Zeppelins, witches on brooms, balloons, kites, winged mythical creatures. They crumpled up paper airplanes the children had folded, and they dumped the pages into a burning pit in the woods. […] Some of the priests felt tears roll down their cheeks but didn’t feel sadness.” Such horrifying deeds must be at least explained if not completely justified. Surely February has his reasons for enlisting priests, of all people, for his army of law enforcers and above all for punishing a town where people just want to fly kites?

February does have his reasons. Jones just chooses not to divulge them right away because February chooses not to divulge them right away (hint, hint), and it’s not until just past the halfway point of the novel that a straightforward clue about February’s intentions for cursing the town with never-ending winter as well as about the why and wherefore of the novel itself is given in the form of a list of “Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness,” which includes J.K. Rowling and the creator of MySpace as well as postmodern literary heavyweights such as Richard Brautigan, author of one of the novel’s obvious inspirations, In Watermelon Sugar, and Italo Calvino, author of the seminal If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (again: hint, hint).

Suffice it to say that following February’s commandment is a war effort aimed at putting an end to the unpleasant combination of frigid weather conditions and more frigid personal dispositions brought about by February, led by an intrepid husband and father named Thaddeus and a group of bird-masked former balloonists who call themselves, whether appropriately or not remains to be seen, the Solution. What takes place thereafter is a deceptively beautiful and poignant story of family and community, of strange sentences (“I vomit ice cubes.” “Thaddeus faced the Solution, holding his basket of apples tight against his chest.”) and precious phrases (“an iceberg melting in her folded hands,” “the girl who smelled of honey and smoke”), of strife and resistance, of multiple narrators and zero quotation marks, of hope and resilience, of poetic digressions and typesetting tricks (some prefer the somewhat pejorative term, gimmicks), of yearning and loss, of creation and re-creation. It is a fairy tale playfully hiding behind a façade of metafiction (Oops. Sorry, I slipped.) supposedly about the horror of seasonal affective disorder. Hence the title, Light Boxes.