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If you
are reading this, you have survived the onslaught of February,
perhaps the worst month of winter for seeming to prolong the
cold to insufferable lengths. The characters in Shane Jones's
Light Boxes have been through nearly 900 days of February,
and it is making them uncontrollably sad. Unlike in a realistic
novel, however, sadness itself becomes a palpable force, a
physical ailment and a weather front, just as other symbols
in this book—mint leaves, kites, light boxes—take
on not only symbolic but somewhat blurry emotional meanings.
The story of one town's triumph over February, which is both
a season and a person in this novel, is played out in highly
creative, luminously visual, and often emotionally touching
ways.
A father
named Thaddeus, his daughter Bianca, and wife Selah, are the
main characters who already know, at the outset, just how
finite and vanishing their warm, happy days are. Thaddeus,
a man known for flying in balloons, finds that flight has
been banned; a host of priests comes in and "confiscate[s]
textbooks, tears out pages about birds, flying machines, Zeppelins,
witches on brooms, balloons, kites, winged mythical creatures."
The town revolts against February and the banishment of flight,
creating a War Effort to destroy February and reinstate the
other seasons.
Those
who have read Salvador Plascencia's dazzlingly creative 2005
novel, The People of Paper, might find themselves in
somewhat familiar territory. Plascencia's book was so strikingly
inventive in its use of an author-antagonist who killed off
his own characters to relieve his sadness that it is difficult
not to think of Plascencia's character Saturn while reading
about February. There are a number of basic equivalencies
that crop up between the two books; the idea of a War Effort
functions in essentially the same way in both texts; Thaddeus
is similar to Placencia's Federico de la Fe, a father hero
who must lead the effort to defeat the evil author character,
and even symbols like mint leaves in Light Boxes are
echoes of Plascencia's use of limes.
These
similarities bring up the interesting and sometimes exhausting
question of originality. Jones does not simply repeat what
Plascencia did in People of Paper; rather, he uses
Plascencia's premise as a kind of symbolic grammar from which
to build a story of its own. And it is truly a unique kind
of grammar—only in this novel (and Plascencia's) would
a line like "Some people in this town say the more thought
you have about flight the worse February haunts you" make
sense. When February, the man in the sky, cuts his hair, it
falls into Thaddeus' town from above, suffocating them. The
logic of this book is so well-defined that this needs no explanation;
we feel the story and its symbols intuitively, which is perhaps
the most beautiful thing about a novel written in this model.
Still, it is hard not to define Light Boxes in terms
related to People of Paper—where it differs, where
it doesn't.
Another
artful aspect of this novel is its use of all the available
space in it—both the world above the town and below it
are active, the underground being filled with children that
have been kidnapped by February, and through a hole in the
sky, the heavens occupied by February himself. This makes
for many startlingly haunting images and moments, such as
when the supposedly dead daughter Bianca travels through the
underground world below the town:
The
children had developed an intricate maze of tunnels beneath
the town, illuminated by hanging lanterns. At each junction
there were little wooden signs with an arrow pointing
up that said what part of town, what store, or what house
was directly above you. I found my home and climbed up
and shifted a floorboard to one side. My father was there
talking about flying a balloon again. He was having an
entire conversation with himself about how sweet the air
tasted at a specific height. He described wind gusts by
waving his arms through the air from side to side. He
described the balloon ascending into the sky by stretching
his arms to the ceiling and making a noise with his lips
that sounded like the flame.
As in
a dream, these moments function and resonate on levels far
exceeding their deceptively simple language. Though the idea
of February and the War Effort against him feel as though
they've come from Plascencia's dream and not Jones's, Light
Boxes nevertheless builds some gorgeously surreal and
touching, heartfelt moments on this premise. Don't be surprised
to see this author produce work in the future which taps even
more skillfully into the power of surreal dream-stories.
(March,
2009)
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