Daniel Fights A Hurricane by Shane Jones

Carefully as a watchmaker, Jones assembles the distanced spouses’ narratives. He pieces together sections of their stories delicately, weaving in and out of times and settings. Among the segments, a third implicit narrative—truth—slowly reveals itself. The guts of the story lie here.

Readers should not approach this work expecting a passive read for the weary of heart. Jones rarely gives us work like that. His first novel, Light Boxes, also threaded between different planes of existence, and Jones moved with equal agility among them. Here, though, with Daniel’s and Karen’s realms so completely distinct from one another, we have contrast unprecedented in Jones’ previous work.

It’s likely that in an earlier time, this story would have taken a much longer form, with an alternate reality and a serious illness to explore. Jones’ brevity here works to his advantage. He gives a reader room to let imagination and instinct fill in some scenery. He describes Daniel’s world in especially guileless terms: “Through the forest they went, surrounded by deer, birds of a dozen different colors, squirrels, a creature covered in hair, all guided by the pipeline back into town.”

Jones paints a beautiful place. Tigers hide in trees. Elephants block pipelines. Women sleep in pipes decorated with origami animals, the sleeping places filled with notes written to lost loved ones. We come to know Daniel’s allies purely by their descriptions, as they sometimes have no names at all. We meet The Two-Second Dreamer, a creature that gives two-second dreams to people who need them. We meet The World’s Most Beautiful Man with the Worst Teeth, The Man with Tattoos and Canoe Woman Number Two.

Such names add to the mythical quality of the characters and book. The author depicts Daniel’s closest companion, Iamso, as sometimes a boy, sometimes a man. Iamso possesses, like a muse, a gift for writing poems for other people that sum up what they feel. In an interview at HTML Giant, Jones stated that he came up with Iamso’s name by combining the first three words of the book’s original title, I Am So Magical Realism, into a single name. The book took a new form from that point.

Naturally, we find elements of Magical Realism and other genres embedded through the book. We also catch hints of postmodern metafiction, when Daniel or his friends acknowledge their existence is fabricated: “I stayed up all night thinking about what’s real and what isn’t. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference.” In a therapy session with Karen, Daniel discusses death. She consoles him: “Death is a truth, a reality that we all experience. The idea of the Hurricane is just that, an idea in your imagination. It’s not definite in the future the way death is.”

So where is the truth? Karen’s world? Daniel’s retreat? Somewhere in between? Jones constantly shifts a reader’s focus, renaming characters, leaping back and forth between worlds, between times. Not much remains stable, but at this novel’s root we have The Hero’s Journey. Daniel embarks on journey to face his fears and find his wife. In the process, he brings great change to the world of his invention. And heroically Karen fights her own battle to recover the man she married, the man she loves.

Unhinged or sane, grieving or resolute, the Suppletons represent a kind of hero seldom seen in today’s texts.

We’ve been missing them.

Laura Straub is a contributor at Vouchedbooks.com and the Vicereine of Vouched Books Atlanta. Her work may also be read at Purge Atlanta, Scene Missing Magazine, and Loose Change Magazine.