Lee Langley

A 21st-century Holden Caulfield: The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozeki, reviewed

Teenage Benny plays truant from a psychiatric unit and builds a secret life for himself among the books in the city library

Ruth Ozeki. [Getty Images]

The world Ruth Ozeki creates in The Book of Form & Emptiness resembles one of the snow globes that pop up throughout the novel: a whirling chaos of objects and people. The narration is shared between traumatised Benny, a 21st-century Holden Caulfield figure, and ‘The Book’ itself, opinionated, chatty. The author has fun with both wokery and its opposite. Look out for the gender-fluid pet ferret whose preferred pronoun is They.

Benny’s father died when the boy was 12, run down by a truck full of chickens. Now going on 14, he hears voices in his head, objects speak to him (coffee cups, sneakers, windowpanes), bombarding him with conflicting advice. He’s haunted by memories of his Japanese jazz clarinetist father. His mother has become a hoarder, filling every room in the house with mountains of stuff, risking eviction and her son being taken into care. She turns for help to a Buddhist nun who’s written a bestselling Marie Kondo-type book, ‘the ancient Zen art of clearing your clutter and revolutionising your life’.

Barred from school, Benny ends up in a paediatric psychiatric ward alongside a dangerously charismatic girl known as Alice (from Wonderland?). She introduces him to a crazy old Slovenian poet with a prosthetic leg, a wheelchair full of empty vodka bottles and an obsession with Walter Benjamin. Throughout, literature is a leitmotif: Blake’s world in a grain of sand; Wordsworthian intimations of immortality; and Shakespeare — like Prospero’s isle, this world is full of noises. Its ambiguous guardian angel is Borges, and when Alice takes to calling herself the Aleph, it’s a knowing nod to the great Argentinian.

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