Book of Form and Emptiness is Brilliant

 

 

THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS (20210

By Ruth Ozeki

Viking Penguin-Random House, 548 pages,

★★★★★

 

The Book of Form and Emptiness is an astonishing novel. Canadian-American author/filmmaker/Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki teaches creative writing at Smith College. It would hard to find a more imaginative instructor than she.

 

This novel defies categorization. There is a central story, but also mediations on the human condition, commodity fetishism, crows, Fukushima, alienation, writer Jorge Luis Borges, and German philosopher/critic Walter Benjamin, a Jew who killed himself rather than submit to being returned (from Spain) to Nazi Germany. Got that? Now forget it because these are mere threads in a broad tapestry.

 

The narrative involves the Oh family: Japanese/Korean jazz musician Kenji, his Caucasian wife Annabelle, and their 11-year-old son Benny, named after Benny Goodman. Ozeki is of Japanese and Caucasian descent and some of her experiences are likely embedded in her characters. She also lives part of the year in Vancouver, presumably the template for the West Coast city in which the Oh family lives. They don’t have a lot of money–jazz guys seldom do–but they have even less when a drunken Kenji falls asleep in the alley behind his rented apartment and is killed when a poultry truck runs him over.

 

That event triggers a downward spiral for Annabelle and Benny. She puts on weight and her job as a “clipper,” a person who scans papers for mentions of clients, becomes technologically redundant. She’s also a hoarder and a compulsive shopper who can’t resist anything from craft supplies to snow globes. She has to contend with her grief, potential homelessness, low self-esteem, and the possibility that Benny might be removed from her custody.

 

Benny has severe issues. Ozeki never explains–she trusts readers to construct their own truths–but Benny could be any one (or combination of) the following: autistic, brain-damaged, an empath, a mystic, schizophrenic, or simply shattered by his father’s death. He spends time in and out of “Pedipsy,” the pediatric psychology wing of the hospital, where he meets an older boy Mackson Chu, who helps him cope, but try being a kid with peers who know you’ve been in the “loony bin.”

 

Benny hears voices everywhere. Glass speaks to him, as do the crows Kenji used to feed, and even the numbers in a math book. Over time, he begins skipping school to avoid peers and spend his days in secret sections of a city library. He will befriend a homeless wheelchair-bound poet and philosopher called The Bottleman–for the bags of them that hang and spill from his chair–and his ferret-bearing acolyte, The Aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet associated with the oneness of God. She is a slightly older than Benny and a street person who fancies herself a poet and artist. Benny is thoroughly smitten by her.

 

Does this novel sound unusual enough for you? Let’s go further. There are multiple narrators, including Annabelle, Benny past and present, a Zen priestess named Aikon devoted to uncluttering, and Benny’s therapist. When was the last time one of the narrators was the book itself? Book tells us, “In the beginning, before there was life, everything mattered.” Once life appeared, the world bifurcated into the Made and the Unmade and books became “the High Priests of the Made” with the “power to save you from meaninglessness, from oblivion, and even from death, and for a time, we books believed we could save you, too…. What folly.”

 

Ozeki unsettles us at every turn. Benny feels emotional, psychological, and physical pain throughout the novel, but so do others. Ozeki (via Benny) ponders Creation: “Unbound, you could see the universe becoming, clouds of star dust, emanations from the warm little pond, from whose gaseous bubbling all of life is formed. In this Unbound state … you encountered all that was and could be: form and emptiness and the absence of form of emptiness. You felt what it was to open completely, to merge with matter and let everything in.” But the planet is also in pain and Ozeki gently nudges us to ponder whether the end of the Anthropocene is nigh. Call it a metaphor inside of a conundrum. Ozeki (through Aikon) explodes conventional notions of value and in so doing, leads readers to consider what should be kept and what can be discarded.

 

Still, Ozeki is a priest but not a preacher. Her book opens with an epigram from Benjamin: “(According to the capabilities of the reader) books have their own destinies.” Yet later she asks whether the book she reads is the same as the one you read, even when it’s the same book.” If good questions are the key to insight, this is one wise novel. It also scores high on the literary scale. The ending might be a smidgen too saccharine, but I was so lost in thought that I scarcely noticed.

 

Rob Weir