The Book of Form and Emptiness
by Ruth Ozeki
Summary
A year after Benny Oh's father is killed in an alley behind their house, the boy starts hearing things. Not voices in the ordinary sense: the things themselves, scissors with opinions, a window's complaint, the collective mutter of everything manufactured, and school scissors that suggest terrible uses. His mother Annabelle, meanwhile, is disappearing under objects: an archivist for a media monitoring firm, she brings her work home, and grief turns accumulation into hoarding until the house itself becomes the novel's loudest voice.
Benny's refuge is the public library, where the objects speak more politely, and where he falls in with a crew of the institution's unofficial residents: a fierce, damaged street artist he knows as the Aleph, and a one legged Slovenian philosopher poet the shelters call the Bottleman, who talks to Benny about Walter Benjamin between benders. The other voice in Benny's life is the book itself, because Ozeki's narrator is the Book, this book, in conversation with the boy whose story it is telling, arguing with him about what happened and negotiating what may be said.
That device carries the novel's real subjects: where the line runs between hearing voices and paying attention, what psychiatry does with boys like Benny, and whether the things we make carry the feelings we put into them, a question the book takes seriously via Zen rather than answering.
Around five hundred and fifty pages, digressive by design.
Best for readers who want grief, consumerism and mental health handled with playfulness rather than solemnity, and who will forgive a novel for trying to do everything at once.
Historical Context & Significance
The Book of Form and Emptiness won the Women's Prize in 2022, a divided choice the reviews had predicted: the Guardian enjoyed its dry, methodical good humour, the Washington Post found it cluttered and compelling in the same paragraph, and the Telegraph dismissed it outright, which is roughly the spread a maximalist novel of ideas should expect.
Ruth Ozeki is the prize list's genuine anomaly: a Japanese American novelist, filmmaker and ordained Zen Buddhist priest, and the book runs directly on that practice, taking its title from the Heart Sutra and its animating question, whether insentient things speak, from a Zen parable, with a fictional Zen decluttering guru satirising the Marie Kondo industry along the way. Her father's death and her own experience of hearing voices after it are declared sources.
It was her fourth novel, following A Tale for the Time Being, a Booker finalist with a similar reader and book entanglement, and and the Vancouver Public Library's central branch sits behind the library at the novel's heart.