Our things would like a word with us
Put your shoe on the table,” reads the note, written on a slip of paper and handlettered to look like an oldtimey typewriter. “Ask it what it wants from you.”
For a few moments Benny, the protagonist of Ruth Ozeki’s newest novel “The Book of Form and Emptiness,” considers the slip of paper’s command. He is sitting in an empty room in the children’s psychiatric ward of a hospital, where the thirteen-year-old is adjusting to his new antipsychotic medication under professional supervision. After making sure the coast is clear, he takes off his shoe and puts it on a nearby table.
“Okay, shoe,” he says. “What do you want from me, anyway?”
In Ms. Ozeki’s novel, there is a distinct possibility that the shoe will reply. “The Book of Form and Emptiness” is about a boy and his mother muddling through a crisis at the intersection of grief, mental health, and puberty. It’s also a book about writing, creation, and our attachment to things. The novel is a meditation on our relationship to objects, but this is no human- focused one- sided approach to looking at stuff — no, “The Book of Form and Emptiness” cares deeply about what things have to say too.
Mostly, it turns out that our things are pretty mad at us. Teapots hate songs about them. Christmas ornaments resent being smashed. Table legs remember better days.
“It’s an ordinary kind of marvelous-ness,” said Ms. Ozeki, whose work has been a finalist for the Booker Prize (a big-deal British fiction award), when I asked her about the role of magical realism in the novel. She loved the idea of a boy able to communicate with knick- knacks, window panes, and toys.
But the Canadian-American author set Benny’s story in our very real, and cruel, world. Those ordinary conversations with objects gets Benny stuck in a hospital — a situation his author finds distressing as it is characteristic of our culture’s approach to mental health.
Ms. Ozeki questions the vilification of engaging with the imaginary. “As fiction writers, we hear voices, and we have hallucinations,” she said, “but for some reason society has decided that that’s okay for us, but it’s not okay for somebody else.”
“Other people have another story about what’s going on. So this idea of what is normal is one of the things that I very much wanted to call into question through the writing of the book, and to point out that normal is a cultural construct — it’s a fiction, we made it up. So since we made it up, we can remake it into anything we want, right?”
Ms. Ozeki has a delightful tendency to follow ideas through to their logical conclusion. If Benny can talk to things, shouldn’t he be able to talk to the book he’s in? It is a thing too. Benny, the character, starts to correct the book when he has to — the book isn’t always accurate.
“I don’t want to tell you how to do your job or anything, but you’re skipping over all the good stuff,” Benny admonishes in a different font. Suddenly, the novel goes from being a construction of its author, to a negotiation between its subject and story.
“This question about what’s negotiable applies to so much. It applies to the way Benny co-creates the book and the way that the book creates Benny. And it also applies to things like Benny’s mental health,” Ms. Ozeki said. “Clearly that’s negotiable too.” Any one who has ever struggled to get an accurate diagnosis will relate to that.
Members of my family have been touched by mental health issues. As I read “The Book of Form and Emptiness,” I found myself sharing passages with them, finding grounds for conversation about difficult subjects.
Often, when books are literary and engaging, we forget that they have the power to do more. In this novel, Ms. Ozeki is able to perform so many difficult tasks at once: She writes beautifully, masterfully, making every sentence sing; she also throws the reader into delightful intellectual arguments about early 20th Century German philosophers; she humanizes people falling to pieces; and she gives voice to the objects that define our lives.
Ms. Ozeki, who is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, takes it all in stride, even as she writes about people on the edge of collapse. It parallels her understanding of the human condition:
“I think that anybody who opens their eyes understands that we’re in a pickle here — collectively, given the state of the world, we are really in a pickle. I also think that Zen practice comes in handy,” she said, “in the sense that we have to recognize that we are in a pickle. At the same time, we also have to go on with our lives, and we have to do whatever we can to not descend into a total panic.”
“Writing a novel is my coping strategy, it’s my way of keeping my eyes open,” she continued. She recommends we all find our own coping mechanisms, however strange they may be.
Sometimes, that means talking to your shoe.
It might not reply. Benny’s shoe doesn’t. Even after he asks politely.
“Okay, fine,” Benny says after waiting too long. “Be that way.”
Ruth Ozeki will be appearing in Pittsburgh as a part of the “Ten Evenings” series on March 13 at 7:30 pm. More information and tickets are available through Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures.