Fiction Lucy Scholes

THE BOOK OF FORM AND EMPTINESS by Ruth Ozeki 560pp, Canongate, £9.99, ebook £7.99 ★ ★★★★

Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness has won this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. If you like the sound of a story of a mother and son’s struggles after a tragic loss made torturously longwinded by postmodern digressions, heavy-handed proselytising and magical realist whimsy, this is the book for you. As for me, I can’t remember the last time reading a novel felt like such an uphill slog.

Kenji Oh, a jazz clarinettist with substance abuse issues, is killed one night while lying, stoned, in an alley. The driver of a chicken truck runs him over, thinking he’s a bag of rubbish, beginning a disastrous downward spiral in the lives of Oh’s family. His wife, Annabelle, becomes a hoarder, while Benny, her 14-year-old son, starts hearing the “voices” of inanimate objects: the “groans” of cheeses, “screaming” coffee beans. After a stint on a psychiatric ward, he starts skipping school, heading to the local library instead, where he hooks up with an artist who calls herself The Aleph, her non-binary pet ferret TAZ, and The Bottleman, a vodka-swilling Slovenian hobo poet who encourages Benny to ask “Vat is real?” Meanwhile, Annabelle is reading Tidy Magic, a self-help manual by a Marie Kondo-like Buddhist, whose back story, just to add to the noise, we’re also treated to.

The primary narrator is a sentient “Book” – who apparently lives in the library Benny visits, speaks in the plural (“like mushrooms, we are a collective. Our pronouns are we, our, us”) and likes to spout literary platitudes.

Ozeki is at her best when writing about Annabelle. There’s something almost unbearably painful about watching this hapless woman’s world collapse around her. But the book is a jarring cacophony of voices, themes and ideas. The more of it I read, the more I understood Benny’s pain. I just wanted everyone and everything involved to shut up.