The Boy in the Box

January 13, 2003
Nelson plays a cagey, Kafkaesque cat-and-mouse game with reality and illusion in his quirky debut novel, which chronicles a man's search for a murdered boy. Smith, an industrial designer, moves to New York City to look for a job and sublets his sister's Queens apartment. Soon after he settles in, he encounters the building's bizarre janitor, Kogat Dezmun, who mutters something barely intelligible about a young boy who has been abducted and imprisoned in a wooden box. Smith imagines Dezmun is raving until he sees a news report on a similar crime, but when he tries to confront the janitor again the man's son intervenes. Smith takes his strange story to the local police, who are familiar with the weird janitor and offer some tepid reassurances that he didn't commit the crime. But Smith can't shake the feeling that Dezmun knows something, and he continues to conduct his own odd search for the boy's tormentor. The search goes on even when the police announce that the crime has been solved, and the novel ends with a fittingly bizarre job interview in which Smith discovers that he has become part of a murky conspiracy. Nelson manages to make the book work on two levels, sustaining his thin plot while developing enough mysterious atmosphere to lend events a more surreal significance. Parts of the narrative are a bit clumsy and opaque, but Nelson creates an edgy, compelling world that will remind readers of Paul Auster and cartoonist Ben Katchor.

February 15, 2003
This first novel is a sort of American Candide. Fresh from a West Coast college and visiting New York City to find a job, the protagonist, referred to simply as Smith, immediately gets pulled into a Kafkaesque quest for a boy in a box by a deranged janitor at his apartment complex. In the next few days, the search for the hypothetical boy, reinforced by a news report of a missing child, obsesses Smith and leads him to one bizarre encounter after another until finally he is behaving like a lunatic himself. There isn't much plot or characterization here, but Nelson does evoke the strangeness of being alone in a new city. In the end, he makes the reader realize that the book is the box, and Smith is the boy in it-or maybe you are. Recommended for large public and academic libraries that support experimental fiction.-Ken St. Andre, Phoenix P.L.

Copyright 2003 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2002
Driven either mad or sane--both states are fluid and loosely defined in this Kafka-esque novel--by steamy summertime heat and isolation, Smith, a young industrial designer, comes to New York to seek his fortune. He stays alone in his sister's small, un-air-conditioned apartment while she is out of town. He prepares for a job interview, watches TV, sleeps, and dreams. But what is dream in Nelson's short novel? Are the janitor's ravings about a naked "boy in the box" those of a thickly accented lunatic, or do they amount to an authentic plea to save a young life? Why does the janitor's burly son confront Smith to try to keep him from speaking with the police and the older man who may be his father? Why does Smith seem to be the only one who cares about the supposedly boxed boy's fate? Why are the police so apathetic? When does a surreal employment interview become a shadowplay in a mirror, a metaphor for a cosmos known as the Experiment?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)