The Boy in the Box

By Lee J. Nelson

Book Overview

In this highly original, Kafka-esque novel, Smith tries to recruit others to help him solve the mystery, only to encounter the same resistance and denial. He concludes he must solve it on his own. Fast-moving and accessible, this book is a suspenseful, surreal foray into a city that no one really knows, where the pain and danger of being an outsider in an eerie, menacing and anonymous world can both frighten and amuse.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1882593669
• ISBN13: 9781882593668
• Release Date: November 2002
• Publisher: Bridge Works Publishing Company
• Length: 226 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

New York as a Haven for the Estranged

While reading this book, many strange feelings and associations flitted through my mind: have I never noticed the beauty and lonliness of New York? Does lonliness cause people to search for higher truths? And- is New York the only place where insanity can adapt? This is a striking book. It will hit many chords of sympathy between yourself and the protagonist. Until suddenly, you are hit with sickening differences.

DYAD THIS or A RAT IN A CAGE ON A STAGE

Understandably, Lee J. Nelson's debut novel, THE BOY IN THE BOX, is called "Kafka-esque," reference being to certain key similiarities to one of Franz Kafka's last unfinished novels, THE CASTLE. Like Kafka's "K", Nelson's man "Smith" (that's all we get, just "Smith") is "the unprepared applicant, snared between a vague possibility and the cold, hard facts." If Kafka's view of the human condition is one of helpless, blind bureaucracy, here we have human condition as audition, a kind of tortured stage-drama in which only everyone else's lines and actions are rehearsed. THE BOY IN THE BOX may be something closer to what Kafka had in mind and may have ultimately written had he lived to finish THE CASTLE, which comes down to us as a clumsily translated, rough and wordy first-draft. Still, at just 210 pages, Nelson's book is too long, especially through the first half where we are too often treated to redundant descriptions and situations trickling along the frail rails of a precariously thin plot instead of more carefully regulated pacing and momentum. On the plus side, however, the author cleverly fills his story with contradictions, with characters who are obviously one thing yet claim to be another, whose actions are designed to superscede our expectations, so far as we are allowed to form any. Nelson delights in ensnaring his readers and poor Smith into one questionable assumption after another until we just don't know what to believe. The trick is to make us care. This book would have fared better had Smith been only a slightly more sane and sympathetic character, and had Kogat Dezmun, the absurdly bizarre man whose unintelligible mutterings send Smith careening off on a misguided crusade to save his mythical boy in a box, less bizarre. Smith's unreasonable and sometimes just plain stupid reactions to Dezmun and others too often drive the reader right out of the story. A more subtle approach would have worked better. The real genius of THE BOY IN THE BOX comes in chapter seventeen, too close to the end, and a scene that would have provided an excellent beginning to Nelson's story. Smith has been preparing since page 5 for a job interview for a position with an industrial design company. It is a solemn relief when he finally gets there on page 169 and while we fully expect more strangeness and absurdity, nothing prepares Smith or the reader for the so-called "interview" Smith is forced to endure at the hands of yet another of Nelson's enigmatic pseudo-aliases. The wording is precise here, the dialogue displaying a finer ear than earlier passages, the use of the absurd to explain the absurd comical. There is, in fact, a veritable current of fine writing from here to the end, and it is these final two chapters that make this an important novel, if not an entirely cleanly exectuted one.

The Author In The Box With The Boy and The Reader

While, first and foremost, this is a very entertaining reading experience. But with the proviso that you must really know yourself well enough to to be aware of what you might truly find entertaining, and compelling...it might be to watch someone squirm uncomfortably.The 'excitment of change & whole new life' and dealing with the inevitable downside - feeling totally alienated. And yet the comfort is short lived as life and circumstances grow more absurd. Best of all, Lee Nelson has the protagonist, Smith, instead of remaining the solid; which all the liquid lies and bizarre attitudes around him can be as foil to...Smith grows more and more, well he changes to an absurd degree as well putting us readers in the lovely quandry of not knowing who's point of view is right - Smith's or the world's And Then, He has You Right there In The Box with him. With no was out, nyt the last syllabble

A world gone mad

Poor Mr. Smith, who has just moved into his sister's apartment in New York City, is being attacked from all sides. His bizarre neighbor, Kogat Dezmun, carries on nearly unintelligible conversations with him about a young boy being kept naked in a wooden box. Dezmun's son, who insists he ISN'T Dezmun's son, tells Smith to leave the old man alone, but Smith has read in the newspaper about a four-year-old boy who has been abducted, and he is growing more and more convinced Dezmun knows something. Smith takes his story to the police, only to be assulted both phsycially and emotionally. He is told to go home and find a girl and drink wine and watch movies. Instead, he continues to search for this boy, finding some mysterious dealers who promise him things that never materalize. And then he is treated to a job interview that leaves his head spinning.Frankly, the whole of THE BOY IN THE BOX left my head awhirl. While the book is a mere 210 pages long, the story could have easily been told in only a 100. The beginning chapters are slow, though eventually the torper leads the reader into an almost hypnotic state in which the many bizarre twists may seem a bit more believeable, though most assuredly are not. This book is not a mystery. It is not even a solid plot. Rather, it is a serious of fun house mirrors in which you see increasingly surreal portraits of both Smith and his world, and are left wondering which of them is sane, if either.Readers interested in coherent plots and solid logic should look elsewhere, but for those of you hooked by edgy little books with haunting messages, THE BOY IN THE BOX will do nicely.

A strongly recommended, darkly suspenseful novel

The debut novel of Lee J. Nelson, The Boy in the Box is a harrowing and deftly written mystery. When a newcomer named Smith arrives in New York City he learns that a boy has been kidnapped and imprisoned within a box. In Smith's attempts to learn more, to get help from the authorities, and to find and rescue the child are met with disbelief, contempt, or even questions of his sanity at every turn, it is up to Smith to solve this Kafkaesque mystery himself. The Boy In The Box is a strongly recommended, darkly suspenseful novel.