The Box

Wong’s inventive latest (after the essay collection Listen, We all Bleed) is a feast of knotty sentences. A physical and metaphorical box, small enough to fit into a pocket, travels through multiple locations as a series of narrators share observations and philosophical tidbits. “I shall wrap the question of responsibility in a question equally roundabout and relative,” one declares. So it goes, from a snow-covered street to an art gallery, an antique shop, an airport bar, and elsewhere. The initial discoverer of the box, a self-described “inveterate mumbler,” comes upon the box after it falls from the coat of a pedestrian. While the multiple narrative voices share a Proustian excess, the forms and focuses of their accounts vary. The penultimate chapter, for instance, is built around the story of a murder, and gradually reveals the victim, witnesses, and perpetrator. The final section, set in a train station and told in a series of emails (with much of the text crossed out but still legible), contemplates that crime as well as others, and asks thorny questions about the functions of narrative. The elaborate wordplay and run-on sentences eventually grow tiresome, though they entertain in short bursts. Fans of experimental fiction ought to check this out. Agent: Akin Akinwumi, Willenfield Literary. (Sept.)