Shane Jones, Light Boxes. Publishing Genius, 2009.
Ken Baumann on Light Boxes by Shane Jones: "I feel it’s hard today to find a work of art that is earnest, that is compassionate. (Michael Kimball’s Dear Everybody comes to mind). I was startled by Shane Jones’s novel because it is so painfully both; it bleeds itself, and bleeds for others. Light Boxes is a story about a community, about a man’s quest to rid his community of February, a bitter and long spell of cold that haunts the the town and its people."
Shane Jones is in his early R.E.M. phase, indie star goes big (he signed a deal with Spike Jonze and Ray Tintori, so Light Boxes the movie will be made + Penguin is going to republish it and make it planetary).
Although it seems very "magical" and surrealistic while you are reading it, Light Boxes actually grows into a fairy tale about compassion. Like Shane said in an interview at Bookslut: "I want my characters to feel like real people that would act compassionately like I would. What I know and how I would act is all I can go on really to connect characters to readers. I also don’t want to read about characters that are doing terrible things really. Making them do things outside of what I would do, just kind of loses it for me. I’m having trouble explaining it. I think in Light Boxes the characters are all compassionate people and as a reader I hope they feel compassionate towards them. I really like compassion I guess."
"Last year when I read
Light Boxes it had just been published by Publishing Genius Press, a small independent press in Baltimore, and I knew I was reading an extraordinary book. Only a few months later the book was optioned for film by Spike Jonze (whose film
Where the Wild Things Are is similar to
Light Boxes in many ways) and then got picked up by Penguin. That the book has caught the attention of so many people is hardly a surprise.
Light Boxes is a contemporary fable set in a small town where an endless February has become something of a plague of cold and gray, draining life of color and happiness. Anything to do with flight (including flight itself and flying objects) has been banned and eradicated, and this ban is enforced by a sect of priests who stalk about the town with axes, ready to destroy any violation. The story is narrated through short sections, usually just a page, alternating points of view a la Faulkner in
As I Lay Dying. Additionally, author Shane Jones uses various tools to add texture to the already fantastic and imaginative story: a list of missing children, transcriptions of found handwritten notes, the distillation of a report from the priests who’ve been spying on the townspeople, and even different fonts and font sizes.
The main character, Thaddeus Lowe (based very loosely on the self-made scientist/inventor/aeronaut from the Civil War era), is an ordinary man who just wants to live with his wife, Selah, and his daughter, Bianca. The increasingly tense and dreary atmosphere makes this difficult, and Thaddeus finds some relief by keeping a contraband kite that he lets his daughter fly while watching for priests in the woods.
Before long for the reader (but eons for the characters), February has burst beyond its usual 28 or 29 days and does not seem to be nearing an end. Moreover, children begin to disappear: “
Evie Rhodes—taken from her bed on February the 127th. . . . Jessica Chambers—vanished while walking with her dogs on February the 312th.” Eventually some of the townspeople are coaxed into action to break February’s stranglehold on their lives. The catalyst for this subversive action is a mysterious group of figures wearing colored bird masks. The reluctant hero Thaddeus says,
'The Solution came to my window last night. They had on their bird masks and black top hats. They wore a single brown scarf around their necks. I said I understood the need to rebel and protect our town against February. I reminded them of the tactics used last year.
Most important, they said, think of your daughter, Bianca.'
Indeed, one of the missing children is Thaddeus’s daughter, Bianca.
In an effort to deny February’s extended deep freeze, the people declare war on the second month. They attempt to undermine February’s crushing power by acting as though warm weather has arrived, and when that does not work they boil water and throw it on the snow. The titular light boxes come into play as part of a scheme to produce ultraviolet light to help rouse people from their stupor.
Though not necessarily surreal,
Light Boxes is decidedly non-realist. The townspeople often see a child’s feet dangling from a hole in the sky, and at one point a plague of moss overtakes the town.
'To watch the way those horses died. To have felt the waves of their muscles contracting and shaking under that skin of mushy green. It was too much for me. The floor and walls were covered in moss. The dog was covered in moss but was still alive, and he ran around the home barking green-colored clouds. Thaddeus was tearing out fistfuls from the walls.'
Despite the white of the snow, the green of the moss, and the multi-colored bird masks, the most integral color in
Light Boxes is gray. This color of vagary and indistinction suffuses Jones’s entire book, and this characteristic is part of what makes the story so compelling. The beginning of the story borders on cliché, yet Jones succeeds by taking familiar plot into misty gray territory.
As the story moves along, February becomes more than a month, more than a name for the cold heart of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. February becomes increasingly anthropomorphic until he is a distant, godlike entity who is said to be responsible for the frigid atmosphere of misery and apathy, as well as abducting the children. One character concretizes it by speaking of “the sadness inside us that is February.” Not much later, we read a “List Written by February and Carried in February’s Corduroy Coat Pocket”:
'I am not a bad person. I have enjoyed June, July and August like everyone else.
I’m so confused it almost feels calm.
I am guilty of kidnapping children. I am guilty of Bianca and causing great pain to Thaddeus and Selah and the town.
I want to be a good person, but I’m not.'
Later, February is sitting in a cottage with a girl he calls “the girl who smelled of smoke and honey.” It is here that we first see February incarnate, as a very human being whose own sadness is the source of the prolonged gray season:
'
The girl was telling him that she was tired of being around someone who carried so much sadness in his body. February drew his kneecaps to his eye sockets.
February apologized. He rocked back and forth. When he stretched his legs back out the girl was smiling and running in place. February asked what she was doing. The girl who smelled of honey and smoke said it was to cheer him up.'
Jones also uses differing font sizes to brilliant effect. After Thaddeus suffers another terrible loss, he sits in the street, defeated, motionless, emotionally destroyed and numb. The townspeople gather around him and ask what he plans to do next, how the campaign against February will continue, and he calls off all wars against February. Thaddeus withdraws into himself. At this point, each page contains only a line or two isolated in a snowy whiteness, the words almost smothered in silence:
'
The left side of my body is Bianca, and my right side is Selah. With no body I have no reason to move from this spot.
And Thaddeus’s mind spirals into itself, into strange thoughts, giving the sense that the lines are those thoughts that are not actually verbalized in one’s mind, but are the feelings just before language. Thaddeus continues:
Tell me everything won’t end in death. That everything doesn’t end with February. Dead wildflowers wrapped around a baby’s throat.
I’m going to move my hand today.
I vomit ice cubes.
There’s a ghost next to me.
Get up, Dad.'
The last line, tiny and alone on the page, raises the hair on the back of my neck. The font (maybe 8 point compared to 11 or 12) produces the effect of sensing a still, small voice, and it is that pinpoint of an emotional wallop that accelerates the energy of the story on to its inevitably tragic and, somehow, hopeful end.
Shane Jones weaves words and images in
Light Boxes with an innocence that is deceptively simple. The book is succinct as well as fantastic and imaginative, at turns tender, funny, incredibly sad, and spirited. I applaud Penguin for publishing this strange and moving book.
Light Boxes is the complete package of literary innovation as well as an accessible, engaging, and moving story that traverses
human emotion while creating new experiences in narrative fiction." - Josh Maday
Few drops of wonder from Light Boxes:
"A scroll of parchment was nailed to an oak tree, calling for the end of all things that could fly. Everyone in town gathered around to read it. Trumpets moaned from the woods. Birds dropped from branches. The priests walked through town swinging axes. Bianca clutched Thaddeus's leg and he picked her up under the arms and told her to hold him like a baby tree around the neck and Thaddeus ran.
Back outside their home, the balloons were spread out on the ground. Baskets hacked by axes. The priests dipped their lanterns into the fabric of the balloons"
Hearts are gonna roll in your body. All your seven wounded hearts.
Shane Jones, The Failure Six (Fugue State Press, 2010)
"A Jesse Ball magic mystery tour in a land of Calvino’s fables? With zany temporal shifts and winsome absurdities, Light Boxes, Shane Jones’s refractive first book, dispatches readers on just such a journey. Lyrical flights and evocative metaphors render the prose in poetic terms. In The Failure Six, Jones methodically dispenses with storytelling, surrendering the text to one strange and beautiful image after another:
'The teahouse was tall and narrow, consisting of nineteen floors. The furniture was all wood, made by a carpenter who was a well-known acquaintance of the owner. Each floor had different-colored wallpaper and on each wall hung large paintings of country barns. All the wooden beams in the teahouse were covered in odd patches of red fur.'
She saw a man in the nude. Yes, he was in the nude, very handsome, and she was as well, nude. Things were hazy. Fur-covered clouds were on the ceiling with little black crosses bobbing up and down.
Here, instead of a tale told from beginning to end, we have a sequence replayed five times with variations: a series of messengers are commissioned to retell an amnesiac’s life story. The message is simple: her name is Foe; she’s a linen and silk seamstress; her mother died in a car accident when she was 12; her father was killed in a duel by a man with a green mustache; and there was no one to comfort her when she began her apprenticeship. But Foe cannot or will not remember, none of the messengers are adequate to the task, and consequences follow.
You could look at The Failure Six as a parable on how memory always fails us; its central character isn’t named “Foe” for nothing. But this is no color-by-numbers morality tale. If, to quote Samuel Johnson, the true art of memory is the art of attention, then The Failure Six attends to the past’s elusive imprint, the future’s inevitable failure, to how forgetting may be a way toward unbecoming, and then toward becoming something else. It’s an exquisite memento of wildly imagined scenes, odd characters, and nightmares confused with waking life, a slipstream loop where bureaucracy and hallucination are so intertwined that you’re often confused which is the most absurd. This novella is a bright thing, something like a mostly forgotten, but still well-tooled memory that insists itself every so often." - John Madera
Interview by Adam Robinson
Shane Jones, Crystal Eaters. Two Dollar Radio, 2014.
Remy is a young girl who lives in a town that believes in crystal count: that you are born with one-hundred crystals inside and throughout your life, through accidents and illness, your count is depleted until you reach zero.
As a city encroaches daily on the village, threatening their antiquated life, and the Earth grows warmer, Remy sets out to accomplish something no one else has: to increase her sick mother’s crystal count.
An allegory, fable, touching family saga and poetic sci-fi adventure, Shane Jones underlines his reputation as an inspired and unique visionary.
"A grounded epiphany of the highest order, revealing the stark and majestic grace that is present within the loss each living thing must endure.
Page after page, Jones's exquisitely styled prose drugs the ear like otherworldly music—this pyretic, hallucinatory novel stings with beauty at every turn."
—Alissa Nutting
The first, most obvious observation to make about Shane Jones’
Crystal Eaters is that it begins with a countdown. Its first page is numbered 183, and it descends from there, 182, 181, 180, on and on, a timer that makes this novel feel like an unusually rigid experience, temporally speaking. After all, most books are objects that readers pick up and interact with on their own terms, at their own individual paces.
Crystal Eaters’ countdown, however, makes the book feel fleeting. While in the midst of reading it, I imagined it still counting down even when sitting on my coffee table, closed—like I would eventually open it again only to find all its pages blank, its time expired.
Crystal Eaters focuses on a village that “survives on myth,” and Jones’ paginated countdown helps immerse the reader in the village’s central belief: that human beings are filled with crystals—100 at the time of birth—which crystals are then lost over the course of a life (bled out, vomited up, etc. etc.), until a person’s number reaches zero, and that person dies. The crystals are multi-colored, and Jones writes of village kids witnessing “their parents vomiting blue and yellow slush into kitchen sinks, toilets, couch cushions, their laps.” Illness in this book is surprising in its glowing, cotton-candy brightness. Almost psychedelic.
Jones’ cornerstone character—named Mom—is an example of psychedelic sickness. Shriveled by illness, Mom spews red everywhere at dinnertime. She’s down to her last few crystals, and she will die soon, a reality with which her family struggles. Her husband—named Dad—is aloof, trying to make the impending tragedy easy for everyone, but ultimately helpless against his wife’s disease. Their daughter—named Remy—believes that there must be a way to increase a person’s crystal count, thus staving off death. “The universe is a system where children watch their parents die,” perhaps, but not Remy: “She’ll save Mom from experiencing the number zero.”
A fourth character, however, expands the novel’s scope beyond the village. This character—Mom and Dad’s son, and Remy’s brother—is imprisoned, and his name is Pants McDonovan. (This may be the key question of my entire review: Do you or do you not want to own a novel that features a character named “Pants McDonovan”?) Pants used to be a revolutionary, waging a war against the unnamed metropolis that inches closer to the village each day (modernity threatening to engulf the village’s way of life). Now, Pants lingers in his cell, eating pieces of his secret stash of “black crystals.” No villager apart from Pants has ever seen a black crystal before; they exist as part of the larger system of myth that Jones suggests through his use of in-text citations, e.g., “His left eye drips crystal (Chapter 5, Death Movement, Book 8),” and, “the city has powers (Chapter 14, Resurrection, City Hospital Myth).” Remy thinks these black crystals might hold the secret to increasing Mom’s crystal count, but Pants, locked away from his family and unaware of the severity of Mom’s illness, uses the crystals in a different way: he ingests them to prompt hallucinations that help him escape the indignities of prison life.
There’s more “plot,” more “characters,” but
Crystal Eaters is like a dream—not only in its sense of absurdity, but also in its inscrutability: the longer I type away, trying to explain and define the novel’s hidden spaces and possible meanings, the more I’ll drive both you and myself crazy. Like much of Shane Jones’ work (which includes
Light Boxes and
Daniel Fights a Hurricane),
Crystal Eaters should be experienced as a gyrating, sustained dreamscape—almost like a stoned viewing of a laser light show—rather than described and parsed out in workman-like terms of “story” and “character development.” Once I’ve finished writing this review, I’ll simply hand my copy of the book to a like-minded friend; my eyebrows will be raised in mischief, and I will say nothing.
Jones’ invention of black-crystal-induced hallucinations is ingenious, in that it provides him ample excuses to indulge in disconnected, imaginative writing. During these hallucinations, a “headboard becomes an octopus”; “[t]win horses rise on their back legs and kick holes in the ceiling”; and “turquoise worms” lace the sky, somehow leaving in place of the sun “two red lips, a parting mouth with clouds for teeth.” Elsewhere, Jones’ language is more understated but equally fanciful, as when he describes the encroaching city dwellers as “shadow-bodies grazing on the horizon.” Amongst all this figurative language, patterns emerge. For example, Jones seems particularly dedicated to finding ways to describe heat, which sometimes hangs “like a curtain on a movable track,” and other times is “pinned like a dress in the sky.”
But what finally makes
Crystal Eaters such a resonant piece of work isn’t the aforementioned language or strangeness. Despite the surrealism and the playfulness, Jones makes his characters’ sadness simple in ways that even a child could understand. In fact, this novel feels like the work of a seven-year-old with an overactive imagination, who forges a realm replete with magic and whimsy, yes, but also with danger—who builds this realm as a way of fathoming the “adult” world, with its painful realities of violence and illness and death. And at the center of
Crystal Eaters is a question so simple, so childlike, it becomes universal: is there something more to our bodies than mere biology? In Jones’ world, a range of colors lives inside each person—in fact, that very rainbow gives the body its power, its life. And although death will one day drain those colors from each person,
Crystal Eaters reminds us that life itself is a luminous thing.
- Benjamin Rybeck
