Book Review: The Book of Form & Emptiness

For the last few months, I’ve been traveling with nothing more than a backpack, and with space at such a premium, printed books were the first thing that had to go. But the months bore down on me and I missed the texture of the pages on my fingertips, the smell of ink, and most importantly the strange comfort and familiarity that one develops with the book’s physical presence. I thought back to my home library, bookshelves overflowing with literary relationships I’ve built over the years, and I caved: I found the nearest English-language book store in Tokyo to find my next read.

There in the stacks, I come upon Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form & Emptiness. The “form and emptiness” reference first piqued my curiousity, a reference to the Heart Sutra and perhaps the most revered line in the Zen lineage (of which Ozeki is a priest):

[F]orm does not differ from emptiness, emptiness does not differ from form. Form itself is emptiness, emptiness itself form. Sensations, perceptions, formations, and consciousness are also like this.

The epigraphs from Walter Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library” and the personification of the narrator as The Book, its dedication and love for books as physical objects, as actors in the universe, were as if the Universe had heard my cries and placed it there for me to find.

The Book of Form & Emptiness follows teenager Benny Oh who, following the untimely death of his father, begins hearing voices and is subsequently diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. One of the few places he can find refuge is his local public library, where he meets an elderly homeless intellectual and a young street artist who take him under their wing. Benny’s mother Annabelle also mourns her husband’s death, all the while navigating a new life as a newly single mother, supporting her son through a difficult diagnosis – not to mention the trouble she has keeping an eye on him as he regularly runs off with his newfound companions – and trying to stay afloat at her job in a time of rapid automation. Juggling all of these gradually leads Annabelle to develop a nasty hoarding habit, which only bears down further on her relationship with Benny and attracts the attention of her landlord.

Perhaps the most notable feature of this novel is the fact that it’s narrated by The Book itself, simultaneously both a freestanding character as well as a voice for all books everywhere, assuming the role of some kind of Platonic ideal of The Book. It narrates its own contents in the first person, conversing with Benny directly (who also narrates some of his own chapters), interleaving action with commentary on our relationship to books as physical objects, reflections on its own plot, and the occasional finger-wagging at our world’s obsessions with consumerism and nods to real-life events like climate change and politics.

This sounds like a lot in the abstract, but it’s well-contained for the vast majority of the novel. The Book is more like an omniscient narrator than some kind of postmodern commentary Although there are many references, both subtle and explicit, to Jorge Luis Borges, so the postmodern thread is absolutely present for readers who want to pull on it. , often helping Benny to make sense of actions as they come and offering consolation in times of need. It really is endearing, and despite much of its subject matter – mental health, self-harm, hoarding, drugs, etc. – I found most of the book feeling almost cozy.

This is one of Ozeki’s greatest skills: no matter how dark her subject matter, no matter how intense the afflictions her characters have been given, she expertly balances despair and suffering with heartfulness and compassion.

If anything, I would argue that her compassion is also one of the book’s greatest weaknesses. By the end of the novel, characters have truly been put through the ringer: Benny has been pulled into participating in a riot and is checked into the psychiatric ward, the Aleph has relapsed and given in to her addictions, and Annabelle has been fired and is unwilling to clean her home, putting her on the edge of eviction. Things are by all means looking bleak. At this point, The Book steps in and attempts to offer a little dose of reality to Benny as he sits mute in his hospital room:

We don’t want to upset you or make you feel guilty. It’s not out of malice that we’re telling you about Annabelle’s suffering. We’re telling you because, as your book, that’s our job. And even if we’d prefer to spin you pretty fairy tales and tell tidy stories with happily-ever-afters, we can’t. We have to be real, even if it hurts, and that’s your doing.

I read this passage and expected each of these characters to get absolutely thrown into the blender.

But here is where I think the book begins to collapse under its own weight. That bit above comes from page 528 of a 546 page novel. We’re practically at the finish line here, this whole grand world that Ozeki has spun pulled tight, and yet this whole drama gives in to exactly that which it claims not to be: things end happily-ever-after. Benny literally just gets up out his chair and asks to leave, and they basically let him go. Annabelle basically hauls ass and cleans up the house, the psychiatrist who essentially instigated the entire Child Protective Services call does a 180 and vouches for them, “No-Good” Harold gets overruled by his mother who owns the building and the eviction saga comes swiftly to an end. And things end up neat and tidy Now that’s what I’d call Tidy Magic, am I right? Ba dum tss. . For all the preaching about taking responsibility, it doesn’t truly seem as if any of the characters actually learned to be responsible for their own suffering.

I have a variety of other quibbles about the novel: the Aleph is a bit of too much of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for my taste, the whole story of Aikon is completely unnecessary I’m entirely sympathetic to the desire to inject aspects of one’s life into creative works, but some of the Zen references came out a bit ham-fisted to me, although I do have more-than-average familiarity with Zen terminology etc., so perhaps this is a non-issue for most readers. , and in general most of the side characters were fairly flat. However, the fact that I was enthralled for 400 pages only to feel so rushed at the end is what hit me the hardest.

For all its flaws, I was incredibly enthralled for most of the book, and the creativity and deftness with which Ozeki handled some sensitive subject matter made it worth the price of admission. There’s a generosity to the portrayal of Benny, Kenji, and Annabelle that feels nourishing to read, and for that alone I feel good for having spent a few days with The Book of Form & Emptiness.