![]() As the story goes on, we, the reader, begin to wonder what is real and what isn’t until just when we think we’ve nailed it, we, like Benny, discover otherwise. It is, in effect, a character in and of itself, a book within a book. Along with talking to Benny, it talks to us. With a bit of Zen thrown in (Kenji is Japanese Korean), you have a novel that examines psychosis from an Eastern perspective.įor Benny ends up in the children’s psych ward (Pedpsy is what the kids call it) and on medication after medication to control what his doctor - a young woman who doesn’t listen and often seems clueless - calls “delusional episodes.”Īnd then there’s that Book. ![]() Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness is a story about growing up. In addition to dealing with the suppressed memory of her abusive childhood, she’s trying to make sense of her son, who begins to hear voices coming from just about everything: toys, shoes, the walls, and even the Book.Įspecially the Book, which constantly talks to him. Benny’s mother, Annabelle, a naive and rather protective parent, is a hoarder about to get laid off from her job. ![]() ![]() His father, Kenji, a jazz clarinetist and sometime drug user, has just been killed - run over by a chicken-delivery truck in the alley behind their rented duplex. “What is real? This was his philosophical question, the one the Bottleman had helped him discover, and he’d been practicing.”īenny Oh is a boy of 12 when we meet him. ![]()
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