Find Your Voice by Listening
Ruth Ozeki’s new book can help us think about the relationship between theology and our material world.
Review by Karis Ryu
What if someone asked you to consider the genealogy of the tablet you were holding? What if you heard the glass in your bedroom window speak to you: not as in “one day the glass began to talk,” but as if your ears were opened to the stories every particle of the world contains?
This is the world of the protagonist in Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness. After his father Kenji’s death, Benny Oh hears voices, or rather, he is awakened to objects that have always been speaking and are delighted to find themselves with an audience. Benny is already a social outcast, but his existence now becomes even stranger in the eyes of other people. In one instance at school, he ends up smashing a window because the glass was screaming. His therapist, Dr. Melanie, finds that hard to believe, and Benny is placed in a pediatric psychiatry ward. Over the course of the novel, he is diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Meanwhile, Benny’s mother, Annabelle, has a problem of her own: severe hoarding. Without Kenji, who naturally kept their home in physical and emotional order, the household has fallen apart. Annabelle’s job as a news monitor means that there are constantly piles and piles of trash bags filled with news clippings all over the house. Her desperation to better her life, entwined with a sense of hopelessness at the literal mountain of things she must confront in order to do so, results in an unhealthy relationship with objects.
While Benny is adjusting to hearing new voices, Annabelle cannot let go of Benny’s childhood. In one instance, Annabelle tries to find her child in Benny by miming the “I’m a Little Teapot” nursery rhyme while pointing at a teapot. Benny eventually snaps at her and breaks the teapot, explaining later to Dr. Melanie that the reason he broke was beyond simple irritation at his mother for coddling him. She was singing “I’m a Little Teapot,” but Benny knew that was not what the teapot was actually saying. The world Benny sees is increasingly at odds with the world that others around him perceive. The objects tell him things that no one else seems to hear, much to his frustration.
God made our natural world, and God made our hands as well: hands that create, exchange, and carry.
Slavoj, or the B-man (short for Bottleman), a poet who befriends Benny, encourages him to hear the voices. The B-man is the first to tell Benny that he is an artist, and that his ability to hear objects is a gift. He must learn to harness rather than suppress it. Benny’s awakening to the voices of objects no one else can hear is not simply a device for the sake of plot, nor is it an allegory for a boy’s maturation. Benny is real, and the voices are too. His hearing them enables him to see the world in a Benny way. Literally, the reader witnesses a portrait of a (budding) artist as a young man.
The Book of Form and Emptiness has many resonances with contemporary considerations, particularly in the U.S., of the relationship between theology and the material world. Within Christian theological discussions, any spiritual proposition taken in excess can of course be legitimately criticized as imbuing godhood into the manmade. However, we benefit from taking Ozeki’s material world to heart. We have much to learn from her Zen philosophy. There is nothing idolatrous or heretical in itself about considering the world, and all of the materials in it—materials humans have constructed—as carrying active stories. The oft-cited Christian principle that humans are to steward God’s world compels us, even, to live in intention and reflection of those stories—of the delightful idiosyncrasies and endearing minutiae that make up even our most ordinary everyday objects. Life ought to be delightful, because God has made life. God made our natural world, and God made our hands as well: hands that create, exchange, carry things to one place and drop things in another. As humans made in God’s image, to steward the world is to steward these stories. In doing so, we are able to discern what to keep, what to leave behind, what to reform, and how to love it all. We see a more intimately interconnected world.
Some objects in certain contexts are not representative of delight and wonder. A baseball bat is evoked twice in the novel, both times by a gang of street bikers who give the barely teenage Benny substances, strike him, and encourage him to incite violence. “Bats vant to hit,” says the B-man while tending to Benny’s injuries. When Benny is later swept up in a violent street mob, a bat is placed into his hands. He finds that because his shoes were designed to run, they run. Because bats want to hit, the bat in his hands shatters a glass storefront.
Benny is not controlled by the objects. Rather, in his ability to hear them, their passions sweep him along with them. Unchecked, the relationship between Benny and Object becomes a one-way current, like Annabelle’s hoarding. But to force the object into something that it is not would create another unequal dynamic. How can Benny be at peace with his gift? How can Benny live in a mutual and generative relationship with the world?
In hearing the stories that inform every aspect of his life, Benny finally comes into his own voice.
There are two narrators in The Book of Form and Emptiness: Benny and the Book. The chapters are often formed as responses to each other, and the larger text can be considered as a conversation between Benny and the Book. However, as Benny grows into his adolescence, he becomes horrified at the thought of his life being controlled and described by the Book. His point of view disappears from the writing for multiple chapters. The Book scrambles to contact him, and in his absence must describe him in lukewarm narration. Yes, the reader knows what Benny is doing, and perhaps what he is thinking, but not completely. Benny is missing.
It is ultimately the communion between Benny and the Book that fulfills Benny’s maturation. At The Book’s climax, Benny runs into the Bindery of the public library where he and the Book reach a peak of understanding. “Do you remember our conversation?” asks the Book. “Do you remember the places we went and the things we saw? . . . For the first time you could see the voices of the things you’d been hearing for so long, all that clamorous matter vying for your attention.”
The most significant moment of clarity during their conversation in the Bindery illuminates Benny’s favorite spoon. He has carried it since childhood without a particular reason beyond a unique feeling of attachment. But the Book describes an entire history: metal mined in “the rich silver veins in Cerro de la Bufa” to create a spoon that “fed a thousand mouths” in Spain, which then returned to North America “at the bottom of an immigrant’s duffel,” making various stops in The Bronx, Hoboken, and Reno before reaching Benny’s hands “somewhere on the Pacific Northwest.” All of these stories have gone into the spoon that Benny uses to eat cereal every morning. When Benny held the spoon, even before he realized why, he was interacting with its journey. After communicating with the Book, Benny finally understands the voices. He understands the stories that inform every aspect of his life. In hearing and seeing them in full, he finally comes into his own voice. He speaks again.
The Book must end somewhere. All books must. Books are finite, like all things. This Book ends as Benny finds his voice. However, the reader knows that Benny’s life continues, and in doing so it will renew him over and over. A new book will emerge. A life awakening is just beginning.
In Benny Oh’s world, he will be ready for the new book to come into place. In mine, I enter the forge that is my Bindery to undergo the complex but most cathartic undertaking that is to write and to be written all at once. All the while, the Author continues to power the Bindery with the steady, sure, and unfailing hum of a friend who will never grow tired of talking with me.
Karis Ryu is from many places. She pieces together her youth through her writing. Currently, she studies religion and history as a master’s student at Yale Divinity School. More about her and her work can be found at karisryu.com and on Twitter @karisryu.
The Book of Form and Emptiness was published by Viking on September 21, 2021. You can purchase a copy of your own on their website here.
