The Book of Form and Emptiness

Annabelle Oh is Benny’s mother and Kenji’s recent widow. She is middle-aged, works at a news-monitoring company, and often comments on her appearance as being out of place in San Francisco as she is overweight. She invests creative energy into various crafts, such as making a memory quilt, and aspires to one day return to university and complete her library sciences degree. Annabelle works to maintain a “cheerful confidence” following Kenji’s death, but often fails to follow through with making healthy changes in her life due to her depression and grief. Her greatest source of comfort is in consumerism and materialism; she compulsively buys items that have emotional relevance to her. Soon, her main coping mechanism becomes hoarding and endangers her ability to care for herself and her son.

Reading Tidy Magic gives Annabelle an opportunity to deal with her grief, rethink her relationship to material objects, and find a confidante in Aikon. Her situation is urgent because if she cannot clean her house and stop hoarding, she will be evicted. Combined with society’s tensions surrounding the 2016 presidential election, Annabelle’s situation stresses her already overtaxed emotional resources. Throughout the novel, she struggles with depression and grief, and the stress compels her to buy more objects. Her relationship with Benny is strained to the point of breaking, as she struggles to accept his rapidly developing maturity. Writing to Aikon gives her the same outlet for her emotions that Benny’s interactions with objects gives him. Aikon does not write back, but in reading the book, learning about Aikon’s story, and believing it is all connected with Kenji, Annabelle can work through her hoarding issues and embrace her grief.

Annabelle finds a supportive community in the library, including Cory, who comes back into her life when Annabelle is at her most desperate. Reconnecting with the library, allowing the staff and patrons to help clear her house, and finding a new job at Michael’s helps Annabelle rediscover her passions and reclaim an identity that is not related to either her husband or her son.

The Book is the embodied voice of The Book of Form and Emptiness, and therefore Benny’s life story. The Book shares a collective identity with all books and uses the pronouns we/us/our. As part of a materialist hierarchy, Books are at the top as they are “semi-living” (78) compared to the Made and Unmade voices that Benny can hear. They comprise a “rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together” (94). To illustrate this, the text incorporates entire passages from Tidy Magic, rather than summarize or paraphrase its ideas. The book is a multi-voiced entity, using different narrative tenses and moving between first-, second-, and third-person points of view. The Book reflects Benny’s emotional state and his ability or inability to emotionally cope with the events the Book is narrating.

The Book first “meets” Benny in the Bindery, a location that symbolizes the inherent potential for creative work that is found in the material objects that make up books, such as paper, binding materials, writing implements, etc. Once this contact is made, the Book’s character remains stable throughout the rest of the narrative. The Book often emphasizes the fact that it cannot influence Benny’s actions or thoughts but can only record them. The Book’s greatest desire is to have a body and experience human emotions and physicality, and there is often tension between the Book’s desire to explore emotionally difficult moments and Benny’s desire to avoid them.

Though the Book self-references and is present in its metanarrative throughout the novel, it is not a character in that it does not have a growth arc. Other than wanting to record more of Benny’s life for the sake of its vicarious living, the Book has no motivations or needs. In the end, the Book is best understood as a narrative device Ozeki uses to bring playfulness and philosophical complexity to an emotionally challenging story.

Alice is Benny’s friend and love interest. She is older than Benny and is frequently out of contact due to her mental health and substance abuse disorder. Most of the time, she lives in an abandoned warehouse with Slavoj. She spends much of her time at the library, and along with Slavoj, she helps Benny navigate his complex inner world.

Benny meets Alice during a session with an art therapist at Pedipsy, which links their parallel experiences with youth mental health issues. Alice is a mentor figure because she leads Benny to explore his own creativity. He notices her cutting slips of paper and becomes intrigued; later, he finds one in his pocket and follows its instructions, beginning his journey into listening to the voices of objects.

Alice is an artist and goes by the name “the Aleph,” a reference to the short story “The Aleph” (1945) by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. In the story, the Aleph is a point from which one can see the entire universe. The story’s themes are creativity, poetry, infinity, and insanity. This allusion identifies Alice as a visionary who has a point of view that is different than those in the everyday world. Her outsider status gives her insight, as exemplified in the snow globes she creates that depict natural disasters and environmental crises.

Slavoj is a poet and houseless man living in San Francisco. He hears voices, talks to himself, and uses a wheelchair. Benny first encounters Slavoj on the bus and is afraid that he will end up like him since Benny also hears voices. This sets Slavoj up as a mirror character for Benny. At first, Benny sees Slavoj as a worst-case scenario: He frequently sees Slavoj in the library and hides from him because he finds Slavoj unsettling.

After Benny admits to Alice that he hears voices, she convinces Benny to befriend Slavoj, who is a poet from Slovenia. He is writing an epic poem, titled “Earth,” that is a conduit for the voices in his head. He encourages Benny to listen to the voices he hears and write them, leading Benny to write the story about the table leg. This is a new way for Benny to engage with the voices, and Slavoj emerges as a mentor figure who becomes a creative role model. Slavoj speaks the novel’s title phrase in his description of poetry as “a problem of form and emptiness” (276), placing him in a role of important philosophical significance.