H of H Playbook by Anne Carson

  There will come a day, or series of days, when I finally stop confusing Anne Michaels and Anne Carson, but that day hasn’t yet arrived. The last time I read Anne Carson was when I picked up The Autobiography of Red, and when my partner and I saw the format of H of H Playbook in the poetry section of a book store, she picked it up immediately, knowing nothing about it.

The reason for that is because H of H Playbook is an oddly shaped rectangle that opens up to part play-script part scrapbook part art collection. That’s one of the highlights of Carson’s book: there’s a haphazardness to it, as though these fragments are compiled from an ancient manuscript for a play about Herakles lost to time. In fact, one of the opening pages denotes the book as a translation of Euripides’ play first performed in 416 BC—a statement that quickly becomes ludicrous when reading the rest of the text.

Carson’s “translation” is replete with modern colloquialisms and allusions to events that happened centuries after Euripides’ death. In particular, there are references to Jane Austen and the Bolshevik revolution, and so on. This approach gives the book a whimsical freshness that helps to enliven the classic tale, which is, in my view, in need of it.

I’m not a classicist. I know very little about the ancients and discussion of Greek gods often slips through my ears. Reading the back of the book was critical for me to really process the book. Herakles is a hero who goes off on labours to defeat enemies and kill monsters and whatnot. The book makes reference to about two of them explicitly and then glosses over the other ten as boring retrod ground. Apparently, Herakles also went beserk and killed his whole family before considering suicide. In Anne Carson’s version, it’s somewhat implied that he has PTSD and that he has a psychotic episode in the same way a Vietnam veteran might. At the same time, it’s as though he’s controlled by malicious Gods. Again, Carson blends the ancient explanations for more contemporary ones.

A number of aspects of the book remain obscure to me. It’s one of those unfortunate things about revising the classics: the commentary and elaboration of the classics is often more impressive to me than the classics themselves, but I also don’t know the source material well enough to make the discussion truly meaningful. So, when the redwinged man shows up or when Theseus shows up to guide Herakles away, the significance is sort of lost on me.

The artwork is what really helps to clarify the spirit of the book. First, the text is presented in small fragments, sometimes isolating a single phrase on a page to elevate its emotive power. The artwork throughout the book embodies a kind of loose style, occasionally depicting sketched human forms and often splashes of colour. Red for violence and blood. Yellow and blue strips when the mood changes. All of them adding to a sense of disorder mimicking Herakles’ disordered misadventures, perhaps.

I’ll have to admit: the story of Herakles is not close enough to my heart for this book to really rock my world. It’s a nice, short book, but one I’m not likely to return to or have linger with me. I appreciate its inventiveness as an experiment and multigenre text and the way it makes time fold over itself. I’m sure there’s a genius at work here; I’m just not smart enough to really let this book thrive.

Happy reading!

The Punishment by Joseph Dandurand

Back in December, I was in Whistler B.C. and stumbled across Joseph Dandurand’s collection of poems, The Punishment, and was immediately engaged by its cover art. At the time I picked it up, I was thoroughly entrenched in an additional qualifications course about First Nations, Indigenous, and Métis cultures. I didn’t feel up to the task of taking on additional related reading over and above my studies (Dandurand is a member of the Kwantlen First Nation), but after some time passed, The Punishment called to me from my unread shelf and it was, as expected, pretty darn heavy.

The Punishment is a collection of poems written with clear and accessible language, many in a narrative form in the register of fables or Indigenous stories. The poems address the traumas of colonialism head-on, and going through the collection provides an intimate portrait of the artist’s life. The poems address the legacy of residential schools, given that his mother was in one and has religious trauma that is passed along to Dandurand and exacerbated by his time at Catholic school. Incidentally, several of the poems address Dandurand’s experiences being bullied and getting into fights at school. Some of the poems address his teenage and adult years, specifically in his experience with addiction and mental illness, including time spent in an institution. In the final section of the collection, there are more poems about Dandurand’s writing career and his family life, raising two children and losing his ex to an overdose. As I said, pretty darn heavy.

I think it’s pretty common for people with significant trauma to return to the sources of their pain as an attempt to process and move forward. As a personal project, then, I hope The Punishment helps to engage in the act of healing. As an aesthetic project—at the risk of sounding unkind—I think The Punishment needed some editing. The collection is just under 150 pages, which is somewhat long for a poetry collection as is, and I felt that the subject matter got a little repetitive. There’s a fine balance that’s hard to pinpoint—poets often deal with the same themes over and over, but when specific anecdotes are repeated it seems like a missed opportunity to cull to the most effective poems.

That being said, there are some dimensions that I thought were particularly compelling. For instance, there were poems about residential schools, but the real drama is in their legacy. One poem recounts an arson at a Church, which was both contemporaneous and a finely wrought narrative scene. A few of the poems address Dandurand’s mother’s experience at residential school, which is painful enough to witness, but the depiction of intergenerational trauma is what is most powerful. Dandurand’s mother clearly had an awful experience at the schools but nonetheless grows to love the Lord and pushes her young son to accept God, too. It’s such an interesting tension between having compassion for her and being incensed at her treatment of her son, and the way Dandurand constructs the situation across multiple poems is excellent.

My favourite moment in the collection, bar none, comes in the poem “Sinking In.” The build-up to the moment is a direct address to those who, like me, dare to paraphrase other peoples’ stories. He writes, “When I walk away, do not stare at me / to turn and tell differently the words / that I have carried on my back since I was five” (29). The line is appropriate to the moment recounted in anecdote, but also seems to stand in for all victims of abuse, especially Indigenous victims of abuse, whose stories are recycled by White audiences like myself. What am I doing? Rather than sharing the words as they are written, I am summarizing and commenting and inserting myself where I don’t belong. Setting the politics of that aside for a second, the passage I just quoted continues with a brilliantly constructed line break: “that I have carried on my back since I was five / and the first cold touch of a priest destroyed me / into the man I am today” (29). Ending the line about the priest on the words “destroyed me” encompasses a whole world, but the addition of “destroyed me / into the man I am today” is great inversal of how we normally think of our identities. We are made into the men we are; to frame that as a destruction is replete with layers of thoughtfulness. It implies so much in just a few words, reversing our usual thinking that we progress smoothly from childhood to adulthood. That one phrase makes the collection. 

In examining the long-term effects of childhood trauma, Dandurand’s poem “The Parade” provides a narrativized experience of life in an institution. He narrates how they are provided with cotton slippers and lose them. The painting of the inmates is not at all flattering; it paints them as drooling and slipperless and yet provides them with the human dignity we are all afforded: “we all are, yes, / we are all worth saving in one way or another” (102). Dandurand looks at the parade of medicated people and recognizes that he will eventually join their ranks. One of the stanzas offers an interesting inversion, dozens of pages later, to the idea of being “destroyed” into the man he is today. It begins with a doctor advising Dandurand to stay a while longer, take his meds, and offers him the chance to “become the man / with those around me giving me cigarettes” (103). There’s a selfless devotion while he remains a higher status than the other patients: “I will fix / any problem or person for them and soon I’ve been there / for six months when the doctor finally says I should go ho / home now and that they’ve become concerned / that even the nurses fear me” (103). He is offered the chance at rehabilitation and devotes himself to others, though the nurses still fear him for his fighting with other patients. Dandurand balances the theme so beautifully that people are worth saving while still being flawed—it comes out in different forms, which provides the collection some rich layering. It is clear that his institutionalization is not as helpful as one would hope, and there’s a kind of resignation when Dandurand is provided with a pair of shoes—this time to leave. Dandurand imagines the “parade” the new patient “will soon be joining / with all the gods of the place walking and talking / the truth, as if the truth mattered” (103). It’s a powerful final line, precisely because of its cynicism that any person’s truth is taken seriously by those who are supposed to help.

Ironically, The Punishment offers some harsh truths about history, about identity, about wellness—hopefully truths that we take seriously. The overall project is effective, if repetitive, in working through some of the nuances attached to experiences, especially related to Indigenous trauma. It’s by no means an uplifting text, though there are moments of joy, but it is one of resilience: it is survival on display. Despite tragedy, despite loss, despite grief: we persevere.

With that in mind, happy reading!

Symptômes by Catherine Ocelot

    The opening of Catherine Ocelot’s graphic novel Symptômes is fantastic. Ocelot begins by celebrating a new episode of Grey’s Anatomy airing. She then confesses, though, to hypochondriac tendencies and illustrates all kinds of amusingly terrible maladies, to which the doctors, without fail, respond, “ok! We’re going to operate!” The scan reveals a spontaneous decomposition of his organs: we operate; a parasite is turning a person’s skin into tree bark: we operate; my eye fell out and my mom put it in a ziplock bag: we operate. The tone and style of the book is communicated so wonderfully in just a few pages it’s hard to resist its allure.

While the main character is undeniably Ocelot, a number of different vignettes comprise the whole of the novel. There are six women united by being part of, essentially, “Lonely People Anonymous.” Each tells their story and there’s a great deal of tenderness and humour in the approach, culminating with Ocelot getting surgery while the other women watch on and debate whether to smile at the surgeons, eating muffins, and then saying “hey the surgeon is looking, smile now!” and then being presented in a very funny panel with no text.

In fact, Ocelot’s visual storytelling is impeccable. First, her art style is free and easy, casual even—and yet, it looks like it was done, colour and all, with pen, which probably took far more hours than first appears. The art style also ranges from sparse to explosively surreal, but it consistently has a softness to it that elevates the storytelling. In case it’s unclear from the title, Symptômes is in French and French is not my first language, so the visuals were a great addition (or even replacement) for text, and some of the chapters were completely text-free. One short chapter shows two women standing ankle-deep in water; one woman is crying and the other woman is holding onto her. As the woman continues to cry, the water becomes more forceful and the woman hanging onto her is pulled away. The woman continues to cry and the other woman disappears under the water and is pulled away. It feels like a tragic allegory. In another wordless chapter, there are two women sitting by water while beautiful, multi-coloured ducks and birds drift by. One woman seems to be speaking about peacocks and crying and the other woman consoles her and goes through a transformative process, becoming a multicoloured bird herself until two gigantic peacocks appear before them on the horizon. In another nearly wordless chapter, a woman takes care of a house plant for a man who says nobody had ever devoted so much attention to his plant. The two sleep together and he asks her to stay the night; there’s a tenderness between them before she gets up in the middle of the night, puts on her winterwear, and leaves his house, leaving the plant she cared for framed in the window. Ocelot matches the visual style of the chapters to the stories they’re telling and, even without words, she creates such beautiful, tragic stories of loneliness, regret, and isolation.

The text and images can often pair to create the humour of the book, as well. I already mentioned the funny scene at the side of the operating table, but there’s also a scene where Ocelot is at the doctor listing things that are wrong with her. He essentially says that she’s a hypochondriac and needs to stop thinking about her body. The perspective then changes to Ocelot’s point of view. As the doctor says she needs to stop thinking about her body, you see his face and then all kinds of medical charts on the wall documenting the parts of the tongue, the foot, the upper body organs, and so on. Ocelot’s acerbic wit is just perfect comedic timing.

One of the scenes I think might resonate with a lot of people is when Ocelot voices a theory about everyone being connected by threads, reminiscent of Jane Eyre. Ocelot says that there are threads running between everyone and that’s why we have feelings of being watched or that we’re going to run into someone. The chapter follows colourful threads and builds towards a beautiful scene of her laying in a hammock made of the threads connected to others. The message is that when you have connections to many people, you’re able to rest easy in a hammock of their support. Then, you turn the page and see people wrapped in thread, being squeezed as people have trouble connecting. It’s a lovely chapter that could stand alone, but thematically works in this collection.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Between the art style, the clever writing, the loving care towards the characters, the humour, and the touching themes, the graphic novel has a lot to offer—not to mention that I was able to read it in an afternoon. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Happy reading!

The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki

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.