The Book of Form and Emptiness
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Full review here
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 Book
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 . 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, 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.