The Book of Form and Emptiness is an impossibly stupid book that insults reality and readers at every opportunity—not to mention Walter Benjamin. Every turn of the page tested my patience, not least of all because its bloated 546 pages found time for such riveting scenes as Annabelle receiving a massage and placing bids on eBay. It has repetitive scenes and descriptions, inconsistent characters, and offers embarrassing wish-fulfilment scenarios that contribute to discourse in a potentially harmful way. I dread the idea of spending more digital ink on something that was a huge sucky timesuck, but here we are.
It’s my own fault. I read the jacket in the store and it had a few details I thought were compelling. The summary highlights central character Benny’s ability to hear voices from objects like “a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce.” The premise offers so much poetic possibility and I was expecting something influenced by The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Coupled with the fact that Ruth Ozeki is listed as a finalist for the 2013 Booker Prize—and we all know how much I love the Booker—I figured the book would be right up my alley.
Indeed, at the start, it offered a certain charm. In the early pages of the novel, Benny’s father Kenji dies in an alley on his way home. Benny’s mom Annabelle receives the news and if I recall correctly, there’s something amusing about it that she wants to tell Kenji, which of course she cannot, given that he is deceased. It’s a bittersweet moment that made me optimistic for the dynamic of the main characters.
It was probably after a hundred pages that I started to feel like the characters were irredeemably daft and that the plot was going nowhere. At one point, Annabelle asks Benny if he remembers the song “I’m a little teapot” and starts encouraging him to sing along with her in the kitchen. First of all, “I’m a little teapot” is not at all an obscure song. It’s embarrassing to think anyone wouldn’t remember it, and to sing it to your teenage son and ask him to sing along is a special level of hopelessness. Annabelle routinely makes poor decisions—and don’t get me wrong, flawed characters are expected—but it’s so repetitive and so unrealistic. Much of the book focuses on the fact that Annabelle hoards trash and so a significant portion of the novel tells the story of her acquiring things and rather than humanizing her it’s just irritating that I have to sit through the accumulation of her garbage, especially when she’s presented with too much authorial love and too little self-awareness. There are all kinds of moments where it seems to me she’s meant to be a saccharine TV mom who makes her little baby boy feel better and maybe the one realistic thing about it is that Benny goes into a rage at her for being so pathetic—she openly admits to not having friends, so she writes emails to the Zen Buddhist author of Tidy Magic, an obvious stand-in for Marie Kondo, who tells her life story in the book (which again, seems unrealistic for a self-help book about cleaning).
I guess I should probably tell you about the actual plot of the book to contextualize why none of the characters even graze authenticity.
Here’s the short form. Benny’s dad dies. Annabelle hoards. Benny hears voices from objects. Scissors tell him to stab the teacher. He stabs himself. Insitutionalized. Meets friends. Gets out of institution. Skips school to go to library. Meets friends. Something something. Has a breakdown. Meanwhile: Annabelle curates the news? [in 2016 she’s taking newspaper clippings? What? Who is commissioning this archive]. Maybe is going to lose her job. Doesn’t. Maybe is going to lose her job. Does. Landlord wants to evict them. Benny has a book that narrates his life to him and tells him what is happening in other peoples’ lives (Book also narrates parts / has dialogue with Benny for us to er… enjoy?). Child Protective Services are called. Annabelle has to clean her house. Benny goes to a riot. Gets institutionalized again. The library cleans Annabelle’s house. Everything gets better.
Okay, so now back to why none of the characters ring true. They’re all hopelessly idyllic in various ways. For instance, Benny falls for the cool girl at the Children’s hospital. He’s like 13 and she’s 18, if I’ve done the math correctly. She’s an addict, seemingly heroin given that she has track marks on her arms. He first meets her in the institution. Her thing is painstakingly reproducing typewriter font on little slips of paper (so hip) and leaving them around for people to find as little instructions (so artsy). Clues lead Benny to various books in the library (come on, do you know the odds of finding a note in the right book in a place that has thousands of books?). Anyway, when he sees her for the first time again he doesn’t recognize her because she has piercings. Seems unlikely but ok. But then we get re-introduced to her and she’s too impossibly hip, like every stereotype in a teen movie gets wrapped into one: she’s got piercings, she has a tattoo of a sideways anarchy sign and goes by the name The Aleph after the Jorge Borges short story, she has her performance art project of leaving notes in places, she reads Walter Benjamin and fights capitalism, and she has a nonbinary ferret that lives between her breasts and is named TAZ for Temporary Autonomous Zone. Laughable. The one thing I do like, despite myself, is that she has a hobby of making post-apocalyptic anti-capitalistic snowglobes where bills whirl around in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (for example) to show corporate profiteering on climate disaster. It’s on the nose, but it’s a fun concept—of course, she gives it up after showing them to Benny because she realizes snowglobes are just more trash: “It’s just more stuff. More junk, cluttering up the world. The B-man [this is her companion Slavoj, Bottleman] says we have to learn to love our trash and find poetry in it, and that’s true, but there’s enough useless crap already without me adding more” (251).
Bottleman, her companion, is even worse. Remember, Benny is about 13. She is about 18. Their other bestie is an old homeless man who is wheelchair-bound with a prosthetic leg, an illustrious poetry career, and a problem with alcoholism. It’s particularly unrealistic that people have read his poetry and that confers him special privileges with security. The fact that these people hang out at all is ridiculous, much less that they all get along beautifully—Slavoj even forces the young boy to drink with him while asking the big questions about life! Hooray?
The introduction to Slavoj is so [expletive-ly] stupid that even in the cringiest movie imaginable it would be laughed onto the cutting room floor. Benny is skipping school to go to the library and the staff are giving him a hard time. Slavoj miraculously senses this young man wanting to get into the library and arranges a plan:
“I hef a plan,” he whispered hoarsely. “You must stay back. I vill enter first and deploy diversionary tactics at ze book returns. Once I hef sufficiently distracted ze security forces, you must slip quickly past.”
[...]
“It is a good plan, ya? Then we vill rendezvous in Parapsychology on Level Four, at oh-nine-hundred hours.” The old hobo gunned his wheelchair. The massy assemblage of plastic bags filled with empty cans and bottles seemed to have grown since the last time Benny had seen it and now was billowing around the old man like a thundercloud. A tall pole with an orange safety flag rose from its midst like a golf flag or a lance.
Benny glanced around. He was trying so hard not to be conspicuous, and this was a disaster.
[...]
The hobo pumped his fist in the air. “Seizzzzze ze day!” he hissed, sending a spray of spittle flying, and then he spun a wheelie and took off.
The wheelchair careened through the crowd and up the access ramp, shopping bags bouncing, flag flapping from the end of its pole. Benny watched, wondering if he should turn around and leave, but he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go, and since he couldn’t stand there loitering, he followed, walking slowly. (158)
I’ll spare you the rest of the excerpt and just summarize. The distraction is that Slavoj starts putting empty bottles in the book-return slot. Okay, one more thing: “‘Slavoj, you know that slot is just for books,’” the librarian was saying, not unkindly. “‘Not bottles. Right?’” (158). Even he is infantalized. Anyway, Benny sneaks by past security. I’m not sure it’s ever addressed how he manages to go back day after day after day. Surely they’re not running the same diversion repeatedly. When Benny gets into the library, he looks back: “The hobo, Slavoj, had his back turned to him. There was no way he could have seen Benny behind him, but just as he passed, the old man pumped his prosthetic leg in the air overhead as if in salute. As if he knew the boy was watching” (159). Insert Judd Nelson freeze frame and then give me a break.
Slavoj is an obvious stand-in for Slavoj Žižek. Playing up his hobo-like appearance is pretty on-the-nose, but the only redeemable thing is that Ozeki is able to reproduce what could very well be a passage in a Žižek piece; when Slavoj tries to use the book return slot for bottles, he says, “I hef become somewhat intrigued by this notion of a slot. That a slot is a thing, we cannot deny, however it is a thing defined entirely by lack, by an absence of form, by negative space, by its own emptiness” (159). It’s a moment where Ozeki does a little more than pay lip service to the intellectuals that underscore the book (sorry, Benjamin—you really got roped in here) and engage with them on their terms. You can see the through-line from Lacan to Žižek to the fictionalized Slavoj: “We know vat it isn’t, but how can we truly know vat it is? How can we tell ze difference between a slot and, say, a slit? Is a slit slimmer than a slot, and therefore lacking less? If it lacks less, does it vant more? And if so, how can we know if this slot or slit vants books and not bottles?” (159). Incidentally, Alice [sorry, The Aleph] considers naming her snowglobe “The Desert of the Real” and I find it impossible not to think there’s a connection to Žižek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real, itself stolen from The Matrix.
So, some of the central cast of characters are ridiculously detached from reality, but even bit-part characters are just not sensible. After an election (presumably Trump’s), Benny finds himself in the middle of a riot for no reason other than following the hum. Some things happen and then he goes to the Bindery in the library (a place he’d once been before and injured himself on a book cutter). Annabelle calls the library to see if he’s there. The librarian decides to ignore the message and then go home, but oh wait she can’t sleep so she calls the security guard at the library and makes him search various rooms (why have this at all?---she could have been the one to look). He finds Benny in the Bindery and she asks if he’s alright. The security guard suggests everything is fine, but he finds Benny sitting naked, singing “row, row, row your boat”, sitting with his head under the book cutter blade. He tells the librarian he’ll have to call it in. She tells him to wait and she’d be there soon. So they don’t call the police. She shows up and they watch, but she doesn’t call his mother. Presumably they do at some point, but instead we just have a period of time where Benny is sitting with the blade over his head—but don’t worry, he’s not in any danger. Give me another, bigger break.
Even Benny’s character is inconsistent. He’s not smart enough to know how to spell “principal” correctly, but has the knowledge of how to set up a dummy e-mail account, hack into his mom’s e-mail (granted, guessing her password is embarrassingly simple), set up a filter, and forward any new e-mail from his school IP address to go to the dummy account and delete from his mother’s main account. Ozeki wants it both ways: she wants the precious little boy that can win our hearts and be saved by the noble Annabelle, but also the rebellious teenager who gets into misadventures like going to the park and meeting guys that give him free drugs and then hit him in the head with a baseball bat. K.
I think I could let a lot of the unreality of the book slide if it didn’t create such unrealistic and harmful expectations. To me, Benny reads as autistic-coded. I’m not a medical professional, but to me it seems like his hyperfixations and inability to cope with noises are key indicators. Of course, he is also maybe schizophrenic, given his auditory hallucinations. I understand not wanting to pin things down precisely, but the way Ozeki portrays him feels exploitative. As I said, she makes it so that he can be either 4 or 14 depending on what she needs him for. Moreover, it romanticizes his lack of wellness. For that matter, Ozeki romanticizes poverty and addition, too, by having such a happy-go-lucky trio of misfits (again—is an old man really hanging out with a 13 year old taking shots in a library bathroom?). I’m not saying there’s no joy for people who are poor or have mental illnesses. People living in poverty or with mental illness can have and maintain friendships, but this particular combination makes it seem like everyone’s in it together having a good time; Ozeki doesn’t seriously or meaningfully engage with the challenges people face and instead uses their situations as a vehicle to explore more esoteric themes, like the power of books or language. I just think that her own priority to edify literature and books like her own supersedes the material needs of and realistic societal expectations for people who actually exist. Not all books need to be doom and gloom, but because the characters are essentially cartoons it just feels like they’re being used rather than explored empathetically, authentically, and sincerely.
Thus, the end of the book comes across as saccharine slop as well. I neglected to mention there’s a whole section where the existence of The Aleph (Alice) and Bottleman (Slavoj) are called into question. Benny’s psychiatrist says they’re made up, which is pretty odd given that both Annabelle and Benny have interacted with Alice. [What’s weirder is that one of the conflicts in the book is about Benny moving around a fridge magnet poem that Kenji had written and Annabelle getting really mad about it—but he didn’t do it. Alice sees Annabelle doing it (as a sleepwalking poet, I suppose) and this never gets addressed.] Anyway, eventually Annabelle encounters Alice and the two immediately have a heart-to-heart where Alice is just suddenly open with her. It’s not realistic for a teenage anarchist, but whatever. So then Annabelle asks Alice to go with her to the psychiatrist to prove that she exists (as if this negates other very real symptoms Benny has experienced?). It’s pretty silly. But then the psychiatrist knows Alice. Has treated her. You’re telling me that she would have NO knowledge of her patients that she could make a connection between them? What kind of terrible psychiatrist is she?
The ending of their storyline feels unearned. The bond between Annabelle and Alice seems unrealistic. Further, so much hinges on Annabelle being able to clean up her house. She has to clean up her trash in order to avoid eviction and ensure that Benny isn’t taken away by Child Protective Services. The entire book is her battling with this necessity to clean but refusal to give up the past. The solution is that the librarian gathers a bunch of volunteers that throw things out for her. I’m left feeling that Annabelle hasn’t actually grown; there’s some kind of facile platitudes about how she realizes the error of her ways, but I don’t think stopping toxic habits are quite so simple.
The situation is even less plausible with Benny and his mental illnesses. At the climax of the book, Benny is confined to a wheelchair because he can’t convince his feet to move. He’s also mute. There’s a lot of complex issues at work within him, but those issues are solved by magic. When he hears that his mom is struggling, he simply wills himself better, gets up from his wheelchair, and asks to use the telephone to call her. If only mental health were that easy.
At least there’s some minor restraint where Ozeki misdirects the audience. The Marie Kondo stand-in is filming a TV show in the states and it builds towards the idea of her filming Annabelle and Benny. She doesn’t. Even the book recognizes how saccharine that would be. They do still meet, though, at the library where Benny hangs out and they have a funeral for Kenji and it’s whatever. Fine. I guess that begs the question why we spent forty pages building up to the fake Marie Kondo solving everything.
Essentially, the book is magic realism, but with no realism and half the magic. Put simply, I’m unimpressed and frustrated with how many hours I sunk into this one. It’s still going to sit on my shelf because I’m a book hoarder that won’t learn my lesson (do I see too much of myself in Annabelle?). Just don’t expect me to open it again any time soon.
P.S. Let me just ask that we retire the trope of autistic-coded young men whose dads have died so they spend time exclusively with their moms. Jonathan Safran Foer already did it so let's just all accept it.
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