BLACKBOX: A Novel in 840 Chapters [Paperback]

Nick Walker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 2003

Cross a road, take a train, or get on an airplane and you put your life in the hands of a stranger -- every bit as screwed up, every bit as fallible and as human as you are. Then the person turns out not to be a stranger at all, and suddenly it's much worse.

In America and Britain and the sky in between, an apparently disparate group of people is connected, whether intimately or by chance, to the tragic death of a stowaway on board flight AF266.

As the action veers across countries and time zones, the stowaway's real identity is revealed through stolen black box recordings, answering machine messages, sitcom outtakes, and court transcripts. Told in a shifting, circular narrative, the interwoven lives make up a jolting and layered puzzle that builds to a heart-stopping, chilling climax.

An intelligent and invigorating novel with a bizarre menu of dysfunctional characters, Blackbox is the story of an attempt to erase a life on tape.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"Any one of us is only six acquaintances away from anyone else," hints stewardess Stephanie Wiltshire at the outset of Walker's high-speed, disquieting debut, which features the not-so-random interactions of 20 of the most ludicrously manic characters imaginable. As Flight SA841 touches down at Birmingham International Airport from New York, an unidentified female stowaway on another plane begins her countdown through 840 concise chapters (many are just a line or two long), each of which builds urgently toward the disclosure of her identity and her fate. Air traffic controller Michael Davies guides SA841 to its gate, then drives home listening to psychoanalyst Dr. Frankburg's smash-hit self-help tape, You Too Can Fly, which is popular among airline industry employees and aviophobes alike. Distracted by the tape, Davies nearly hits a pedestrian later revealed to be yet another piece in the puzzle, before reaching home and his phobia-obsessed wife. The rest of the cast includes an "unfunny" comic whose act features a simulated suicide, an aspiring anticorporate terrorist, a suicidal pilot, a morgue assistant and a Welsh actor coping with the suicide of a Scottish actress and friend, all of whom are connected in some way to the death of a Chinese woman more than 20 years earlier. Walker's inaugural work is so clever that it seems to be the product of years of careful contemplation, yet so electrifying that it is just as easy to imagine him writing it in one sitting. His respect for his readers' attentiveness is palpable and refreshing, and a character list included at the front of the book is helpful in sorting out any momentary confusion.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Coincidences are cheap literary devices, and this novel relies on enough of them to fill a dollar store. Forget six degrees of separation; these disparate characters don't go beyond two degrees, even though they're split between London and New York. Just to follow one crazy thread: a depressed pilot randomly picks a New York therapist who just helped a woman commit suicide in London; meanwhile, a friend of the pilot returns to England only to meet the suicide's father and assist in his death. On it goes, desperate lives interweaving through a narrative more fanciful than any Harry Potter book. And whether they're unbalanced comedians or jinxed actors, the characters all speak with one loopy voice that keeps reminding us we're reading words on a page. Yet anyone willing to suspend disbelief is in for a clever, darkly humorous tale--narrated in 840 bite-size chunks by an omniscient ex-stewardess from inside the wheel well of a transatlantic flight. Although it's overly showy, this rumination on lost people longing for meaning packs quite a bittersweet punch. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Harper Paperbacks (September 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060532246
• ISBN-13: 978-0060532246
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #671,827 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Absolutely Terrific!, January 24, 2004

By 

Moe Darbandi (Santa Barbara, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: BLACKBOX: A Novel in 840 Chapters (Paperback)

The fact that this book has been barely reviewed was shocking. Blackbox will take you on a mind journey you have to read to believe. Not only is this book clever, funny, witty, and insightful, but extremely well written and amazingly creative. This is one novel that you'll be thinking about long after you read it.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Under the Radar, October 8, 2004

By 

Robby Nichols (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: BLACKBOX: A Novel in 840 Chapters (Paperback)

Now this is craftsmanship. Nick Walker has written a debut novel that reminds me a bit of the device from which it takes its title. A piece of work primed to slip unnoticed into a plethora of similar machinery yet able to survive in the wake of critical disaster (for which BLACKBOX proves quite an easy target). All Palahniuk comparisons aside (Survivor), BLACKBOX withstands its own endless cliches, thin plotlines, and high concept writing. The result is a welcome vacation from an otherwise monotonous literary year. Despite its faults, Walker's creation proves extremely difficult to put down. Conversely, the reader discovers no deeply profound life lessons or tragic true stories of triumph against all odds inside this book. What one WILL find is 840 chapters, 20 different narrators (none of which can truly be labeled a protagonist), 2 suicides (depending on your perspective), at least 10 instances of public vomiting, and ultimately one of the most darkly hilarious novels in recent memory. At the center of it all lies the story of a doomed long distance love affair and the people caught in-between. Walker has spun a wicked web that catches you from the beginning and doesn't let up until the final word. It is a tale of what could have been but (realistically) never is. I wouldn't have it any other way.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars six degrees...., September 21, 2003

By 

garbo_the_cat (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: BLACKBOX: A Novel in 840 Chapters (Paperback)

Wow!
I've never written a review before but this quirky, odd, meandering novel just begged me to write about it.
Any fan of po-mo fiction (Foster Wallace, DeLillo) will dig this novel.
The book really does have 840 chapters (signifying the 840 previous flights leading up to flight SA841). Each chapter is told in a different narrator's voice and each chapter connects and bisects the other chapters....a six degrees of separation of chapters.
Nick Walker is a very original writer with a great ear for dialogue.
"Blackbox" is a chilling, funny (at times laugh out loud funny) and very disturbing story... a fun read that begs you to ask "is life really just a series of random instances"?