She clips newspaper articles for corporate clients, but in the early 2010s, the internet threatens her job. They want to be out in the world."īenny's despair over his father's death turns to rage at his mother, Annabelle. Words are "trapped inside" Benny, "looking for an exit," Ozeki writes. In between hospitalizations, he skips school and becomes friendly with bohemian teens and heavy-drinking poets, who encourage him to write, to channel the objects speaking to him.
Does the soul exist? Is it immortal? Do inanimate items possess a life force? How do we distinguish acute sensitivity from mental illness? These questions fuel a searching novel, one that combines a coming-of-age tale with an ode to the printed page.īenny has grown-up tastes. This book ponders the very nature of things. The author of the lauded novel "A Tale for the Time Being," Ozeki teaches at Smith College in Massachusetts. Which makes a kind of sense - they were manufactured in China. The scissors, for instance, speak to him in Mandarin. But something else is afoot, for Benny appears to be having real interactions with nonliving objects.
This last incident lands him in a psychiatric hospital, where he's prescribed drugs for his hallucinations. Library books wail for his attention as they're fed into a high-tech sorting system: "We are not units!" His mom's teapot disagrees that it's "short and stout." A pair of scissors taunts Benny until he jams the points into his thigh. Since his father, Kenji, was killed in a truck accident, he's been getting an earful from inanimate objects. Why? The window was sobbing and "I needed it to stop," he explains.īenny is an angry boy, but that's only part of the story. Early in "The Book of Form and Emptiness," Ruth Ozeki's heady new novel, an off-course bird bangs into a classroom window: "THWACK!" The middle schoolers are stunned.
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