By Eileen Ying

Review of The Box by Mandy-Suzanne Wong (USA: Greywolf, 2023)

I have a weakness for stray objects. It runs in the family. My grandmother used to carry around a trash bag full of empty bottles and cans, and my mother clings to old crayon stubs and rubber bands like they’re hundred-year-old heirlooms. Me, I look for treasure on the streets – clothing haphazardly altered, then discarded, by inspired queers in the neighborhood; seductive glassware; potted plants to be nursed back to health. Sometimes, I instantly regret it. Most of the time, the objects are good and useful. But occasionally, there’s something else: a kind of tug in the chest that I’m tempted to describe, banally, as fate. I like to imagine these acquisitions as flushes of scarlet on a heat map, travelling from house to house on the saw-toothed patch that is Philadelphia. It’s a funny feeling, getting swept along by a thing that can neither confirm nor deny its aims.

The Box, Bermudian writer Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s second full-length novel, begins with exactly such a feeling. The thing that occasions the feeling is utterly banal, almost teasingly so. It makes its debut by falling out of a stranger’s pocket on a snowy afternoon, in an anonymous alleyway in a city that remains likewise unnamed for the duration of the novel. Our narrator – the first of many – cannot resist picking it up. He finds in his hands a small white box, about the size of a deck of cards, constructed of paper strips woven so tightly that “no strip seemed to have an end.” In attempting to return the box to the stranger, he provokes a story.

The book’s six chapters proceed according to this pattern. The box is lost, then suddenly appears in another setting, then is lost again. With each iteration, we get a different voice, a different style, and a different perspective on the nature of the “object” – both the box itself and the concept in the abstract. And almost every story turns out to be a feint for another story. The first narrator’s story is really the stranger’s story, which is really, or at least allegedly, his friend’s ex-wife’s stepbrother’s daughter’s story. In a recent essay, Wong calls The Box “an experiment … to learn whether [she] could make a novel of which the spark and the kerosene, the ignition and the engine, was a small thing of the sort known as inanimate.”

The little object is indeed prolific, and the range of its output almost dizzying. One chapter is composed entirely of loose shreds of dialogue between the owners of an antique shop. Another is styled as art criticism. Yet another is addressed by a ghostly bartender to her place of work, an old-fashioned hotel known affectionately as “you.” She tells the hotel about a regular, a man whose twin brother once worked as an “indoor gardener” for another hotel. This other hotel, a kind of gimmicky escape-room establishment, had started glitching. The flora multiplied and the furniture mutated, eventually swallowing up the gardener. Meanwhile, the box sits somewhere near the bar, listening in on – or maybe conducting, or even forcibly extracting – the guest’s fantastical tale. Wong appears wholly uninterested in policing the boundaries between these layers of narrative. Wherever we might expect a border, a boundary, or a margin, it tends to dissolve into watery indistinction. Wong’s questioning of the customary divisions between animate and inanimate, subject and object, and self and other are enacted in the very form of her novel.

But the analogy only goes so far. Seams, we might reasonably say, should be the weakest part of an object, the part most vulnerable to tearing or splitting. The box, however, taunts its viewers with dozens of seams and no obvious point of entry. The conceit is that, despite being made of paper, it’s impenetrable, and despite being a box, it contains absolutely nothing. This is a major source of the object’s magnetism. It drives Wong’s characters mad. As readers, we watch in amusement and awe as it enters the art market for millions, as a group of troubled teenagers begin to worship it as their idol, and as a string of robberies and murders crop up in its wake. Of course, the joke’s on us, too. Though the novel is full of suggestions – the seeds, I kept thinking, of so many other good novels – it offers almost nothing by way of resolution.

The box may well have a clarifying interiority, but it’s not Wong’s to give. In this, her novel takes not so much after other literary works as it does a particular strand of critical theory. Wong lists among her predecessors Jane Bennett and Graham Harman, both associated with a school of thought called “object-oriented ontology,” or OOO. OOO rejects what it sees as a tradition of anthropocentrism in mainstream philosophy. It believes in the existence of things beyond human perception. It’s frequently beautiful. The way we perceive a house or a tree, writes Harman, “is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the things that never becomes present.” It has practical uses, too. Bennett, for example, is interested in how nonhuman forces shape the worlds we live in. This she calls “thing-power.” There’s a simple lesson here, articulated by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty half a century earlier: wherever we go, there are objects that touch us, compel us, demand us, and deny us. The steering wheel solicits my grip. The closing door suggests that I turn my body sideways and winnow my way through. There is no existence absent this kind of encounter, and, as Harman insists, there is no encounter that does not harbor some secret.

The theory’s shortcomings are also the novel’s. At times, Wong seems to grasp for a political revelation only to land on a platitude. The Box is at its weakest when it parrots the intellectual mannerisms of OOO – in the first narrator wondering, for instance, “what a particular anthropogenic and to all appearances inanimate thing might get up to over and above what is conceivable to Homo sapiens,” or in the sixth’s “to say humans are animate and trains are inanimate … makes no sense.” It’s possible that these are meant to be parodies. But then there’s no follow-through – all they really do is divert us from the narrative. For this reason, The Box can be arduous to read. More broadly, OOO tends to flounder when it comes to the enduring divisions among humans themselves. Though its practitioners claim to resist the assumptions of Enlightenment thought with a more inclusive, less hierarchical worldview, their object-patronage can feel in practice like a sheepish evasion of questions about race, class, gender, and ability. Are we really ready to be done with the human? Is it always non-human objects that get the shortest shrift? The novel often struggles to reconcile its ideological convictions with its narrative world.

Maybe, on some level, Wong knows this. As The Box progresses, it seems to soften, to give up some of its rigidity. The first sign of surrender comes with the indoor gardener, who breaks a cardinal rule of OOO – that thou shalt never anthropomorphize objects. He loves all of the chairs, carpets, doorknobs, and napkins that are beginning to stir around him. “He wrote nightstands dream of forests because that’s what nightstands used to be,” recalls his brother. “He wondered if a tabletop’s memories of treehood were nostalgic or nightmarish.” The indoor gardener stops sleeping. He’s scolded by his managers. He’s fired, but never leaves. By the novel’s last chapter, we are swathed in this wistfulness. “How many stories [the box] passed through to pass through ours,” writes Wong. “How hard it is for even a human to pass through this city.” Maybe this is supposed to inspire pity for the box, but when I read it I thought of other scraps of life – the bartender, the gardener, an elderly gift-wrapper, a man named Lucrez who becomes a “Citizen-Watchman” when there are no other jobs available – all, in Wong’s own words, “remainders” like the box.

The final few moments of The Box are heart-wrenchingly gorgeous. Here, Wong’s narrative sensibilities shine. Two residents of her anonymous city feed messages into the fictional “Socket Medium,” a kind of real-life “Ask Polly” who – or is it that? – is simultaneously a municipal archive and a digital courier. Citizen-Watchman Lucrez drafts his will and testament. A woman identified as AYJ writes to her sister, who may or may not exist. Old friends from earlier chapters return in unexpected ways. And there’s something else that binds them together, not the box but another thing that has pressed quietly onwards from the very start: the snow. Somehow, the book starts to feel apocalyptic. It hasn’t stopped snowing since the box first landed on the ground, and now all the hotels are full, the river is flooding, and a line hundreds or thousands of bodies long snakes out of Central Station, where trains are no longer arriving. We learn all of this gradually, but the feeling doesn’t hit until the end. How does one live, Wong seems to ask, in a precarious world? In hindsight, this feels like the novel’s central question.

The box offers one last lesson in response. Rather than making the object into a subject, Wong encourages us all to see ourselves as objects. While this is another core tenet of OOO, it succeeds, I think, because it’s posed not as a matter of principle but as one of necessity. As Wong notes, it’s hard to pass through a city, especially when that city is falling to pieces around you and you’ve been rendered a part of the detritus. In these cases, it can be a relief to slip into the backdrop. Lucrez calls it “thinging.” As a kid, he’d be a plant or a door or a sideboard, “not harming anyone, not making noise or mess.” When the box finally falls into his hands, deep into the apocalypse, he can’t help but identify with it. “I wrapped myself in me,” he says, “flatted all my features to white. I was very still. I waited to give my secret. I waited to receive. I thinged.” If traditional strategies of resistance favor speech and action, thinging makes space for silence, for slowness, for a gathering of oneself and one’s accessories before the revolution comes.

Two winters ago, a good friend and I were walking down a street in Paris, talking half-sincerely, half-ironically, and very tipsily about object sentience, when suddenly there appeared in front of us a great mass of stuff, lit up with uncanny precision by a streetlight. In the middle of it sat a garish glass clock – blue and green, about the width of my shoulders, embossed with a huge frog on a lily pad. Printed at the bottom of the clock, just off-center, were the Chinese characters for “frog.” The clock stared at me with its cartoonish frog eyes, and I knew I had to take it home. I packed my suitcase carefully around it and lugged it across two borders. Now, it hangs above my desk. I never bothered to install batteries, so it doesn’t tell time very well. But still, I find it comforting. Sometimes I feel just like that frog – wide-eyed, grinning dumbly, staring manically into space. Who knows what lives it’s lived before?

Eileen Ying is a PhD student in English at the University of Pennsylvania, where they study the history and development of the Asian Anglophone novel. When they’re not scrambling to finish their readings, they can be found climbing a tree, whispering to their cats, or wandering around CVS in a state of crushing indecision. Their work has been published in Post45: Contemporaries and the Oxford Review of Books.