What’s in the Box?

With a book like The Box, a reader has two choices: go along with its games or drop their forehead to the table and groan. To choose the former is to enter a puzzle of six distinct narratives that revolve around an enigmatic white paper box as it is, at various points, misplaced, stolen, and carried across a nameless city caught in continual snowfall. To choose the latter is to consider Mandy-Suzanne Wong’s latest title a convoluted anti-novel so crammed with contrived mysteries and circular philosophies that the experience is akin to being stuck inside the anxiety dream of a graduate student who has fallen asleep in the middle of their Borges thesis.

The story opens with the snow, which has been falling steadily for weeks. It falls at nearly the same rate at which it melts, leaving the streets cloaked in a perpetual layer of fresh powder — a ghostly blank slate upon which anything might appear. It is difficult to get one’s bearings within the disquieting...