EMPTINESS takes form in the absence of a father, taken away by a tragic accident, leaving an
irreversible gap in the life of Benny Oh, the main protagonist of Ruth Ozeki’s new novel, The Book of
Form and Emptiness. In the aftermath of his father’s death, young Benny—who has just turned
twelve—is left with his mother, Annabelle, to cope with this sudden event. As if to compensate,
Annabelle “start(s) putting on weight.” Yet, it is not just her body that expands; she starts to
compulsively hoard items, from fridge magnets to snow globes, anything that could potentially fill
the void left by the missing family member. The mindless purchases, gradually accumulating in
their house, is overbearing. You can feel both the weight and hollowness of their grief in this
clustered space.
The book itself becomes an antithetical space of the material (form) and metaphysical (emptiness)
that come together, as Ozeki presents us with a dense narrative voice that can oftentimes feel as
clustered as Annabelle’s home, but one that essentially speaks of the seeming meaninglessness to
material.
If form is emptiness, what remains? Speech, apparently. “Shh...Listen!” says Benny, at the beginning
of the novel. “That’s my Book, and it’s talking to you.” And it is not just this Book that talks—coffee
beans, window seals, fluorescence lights and paper cups—all of these inanimate objects have a
voice in Benny’s world. When objects start talking to Benny, it is the inanimate that is given life,
replacing his father, who was once alive, and now dead: perhaps a part of Benny wants to believe
that the dead, the unliving can still talk to him, a wishful thinking that would sustain for Ben, a
possibility for a communion with his departed father. What Benny discovers through these strange
and magical conversations with things is the chaos, the disaster and mayhem experienced by still-
life things, that underneath the appearance of these indifferent material objects are rife tension,
friction and frustration. When Benny hears “the chatter of cash registers filled with all those
arrogant metal coins that think they’re actually worth something”, it is Ozeki who is lamenting on
our consumerist culture. The windowpane of Benny’s classroom crying because a bird has hit it
emphasizes the author’s condemning reflection of today’s world that is now overcrowded with
objects, that collide with life and ominously, becomes the reason for death, as seen in Benny’s father who was run over by a truck. Ironically, the preoccupation with these material possessions robs
people of having a lived experience, not just in the example of Benny’s father, but also for Annabelle,
whose obsessive shopping spree arrests her in the perpetual state of mourning and missing for
what has passed, forbidding her to live her life.
After an episode at his school, Benny’s secret that he can hear objects talk to him gets revealed, and
he winds up in a pediatric psychiatry ward. There, he meets a girl who goes by the name The Aleph,
whose protestations against the hospital’s rules and regulations through slips of white paper with
subversive writings provoke the fellow patients initially intrigues Benny. After he’s discharged,
Benny discovers a note from The Aleph in his pocket that reads, “Come to the Library.” Following
the instruction, Benny meets a homeless man at the library, who was once “a super famous poetry
back in Slovenia,” and it is here where our protagonist reaches his moment of epiphany, of a life
that is free of form and its burdens, that allows Benny to finally realize his own agency.
Paper is the tangible form that becomes the main conduit for connection, communication, but also
transgression, pulling us both out of time and space, forcing us to inspect reality from a distance.
The Book, who interacts with Benny as co-narrator of the book, collaboratively drives the story,
and reminds us of our own interdependence with the things around us. Rather than having forms
control us, or trying to possess objects without attaching significance to them, Ozeki prompts us to
reconsider our relationship to things as one not characterized by physical ownership, but a spiritual
connection.
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