Light Boxes (Shane Jones)

I just finished Light Boxes, a short and amazingly textured novel by Shane Jones about a small town whose inhabitants decide to wage war on February. In addition to a period of time -- namely the month we all know and dread -- February in this book is cold and sad and indefinite in duration, and may or may not also be a god or a misunderstood man, an outcast who terrorizes the townspeople with snow and ice (and moss!), leading to the end of flight (paper airplanes, balloons, and kites) and more sinisterly to the kidnapping and murder of children.   
The prose (which is beautiful) tends to be simple and lyrical, similar to a fable or fairy tale, but is peppered with a perfect array of post-modern allusions and devices (some of them quite funny, e.g., references to Charles Shultz, David Foster Wallace, and 'the creator of MySpace') that allows the story to effectively transcend such traditional structures.
The narrative is rich with themes and motifs that (again, unlike a traditional fairy tale or fable, but more like life in the modern world) are presented without easy resolution. A few I detected include: love and the end of love (and life and the end of life); the interplay between sadness and creation; the costs and benefits religious dogma and war (including technology and violence); the sense of knowing someone intimately and not knowing them at all. 
To read Light Boxes is like having a dream (and one of the miracles of this book is that it feels like the reader's dream, not Jones' or even one of the character's) in the psychoanalytical sense, i.e., a dream in which your unconscious communicates with you via an array of signs and symbols (many surreal), but the exact meaning of which the reader (i.e., the dreamer) must work to interpret. As with most dreams, I felt like there were no right or wrong answers to these questions, but that I ended up with a strong intuition about life, and the many directions it may or may not take.

Comments

[Michelle]

Oh! I loved this book! A friend recommended it to me a while ago and I remember ordering it and having it come in a hand-addressed envelope. I suppose I was charmed before I even cracked the cover.

The end of flight -- that got to me. The kidnapping/murder of children is chillingly told, but kind of expected, in a way (how many fairy tales put children at risk?). But the end of *flight*. I had to put the book down and regroup at that.

[Matthew Gallaway]

Hey Michelle -- yes, agree completely!