BOOKS
Ozeki’s new novel features a teen who hears voices
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by Charlie Smith
ormer Vancouver Downtown Eastside resident Ruth Ozeki has hit the big time. The author, filmmaker, Zen Buddhist priest, and Smith College creative-writing professor managed back in 2013 to get shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her third novel, A Tale for Time Being. Her newest title, The Book of Form and Emptiness, is a novel about a teenage boy named Benny Oh who hears voices coming from inanimate objects after his jazz-musician father dies. Benny seeks solace by spending enormous amounts of time in a library. Lo and behold, this might seem familiar to those who’ve worked in Vancouver’s central branch. “There’s an old public bindery in the library and all of that is based on the Vancouver Public Library,” Ozeki told the Straight by phone from her home in western Massachusetts. In fact, she loves the VPL. She researched her first novel, My Year of Meats, in the central branch while she was living on East Cordova Street from 1996 to 1998. In 2007, it was chosen in One Book, One Vancouver, which was a book club for the entire city. “That’s when I got the tour of the library and they took me down into the basement,
Ruth Ozeki spent two decades living on B.C.’s West Coast, so it’s no surprise that her latest title, The Book of Form and Emptiness, draws on her experiences in this area. Photo by Danielle Tait.
and showed me the old bindery,” Ozeki said. “At that point, it had been closed.” A VPL staffer told Ozeki that some believed the basement of the central branch was haunted. “Security guards said that they heard music—and the music was calypso music,” Ozeki recalled. “And so all of
that made it into the book.” There’s yet another Vancouver connection to The Book of Form and Emptiness. She used to live behind the Union Gospel Mission thrift store. In her new book, there’s a Gospel Mission thrift store. “A lot of the scenes of Benny’s house and
the alleyway behind the house were taken from memories of living there,” she said. From 1998 to 2015, Ozeki resided on Cortes Island. Its peacefulness is something that she wanted to evoke when Benny leaves the city for the first time and goes to a mountain. This results in him experiencing different sensory perceptions. “He hears the difference between the made and the unmade,” Ozeki said. Ozeki revealed that at times in her life, she’s heard voices. “After my dad died, I heard his voice calling me,” she said. “It sounded just like he was standing behind me and clearing his throat. And he would say my name. I would whip around and he wasn’t there.” She pointed out that Mahatma Gandhi, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung said that they heard voices. But she said that others who hear voices are pathologized and medicated. “We fail to see that ‘normal’ is a cultural construct,” Ozeki said. “So what I was playing with in this book is what happens if we expand the notion of normal and make it more generous and make it more all-inclusive.” g Ruth Ozeki will speak at the Vancouver Writers Fest, which runs from October 18 to 24.
Booker finalist paints a picture of neurodiversity
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by Charlie Smith
ere’s a little-known bit of trivia about the Vancouver Writers Fest. According to Wikipedia, more than a dozen authors have appeared at the annual event in the same year that they won the Man Booker Prize [now called the Booker Prize]. The Vancouver Writers Fest couldn’t confirm this by deadline. But if it’s true, American novelist Richard Powers hopes to become the next member of that exclusive club. In September, he made the shortlist for the Booker— the most prestigious prize in the English-language literary world—for his 13th book, Bewilderment. It tells the tale of an astrobiologist raising an uncompromising neurodiverse son following his wife’s death. Powers will find out on November 3 if he can call himself a Booker Prize winner. “I have to say it’s a big thrill,” he told the Straight by phone about being nominated. “So we’re waiting with some excitement.” In Bewilderment, the father, Theo Byrne, doesn’t want his nine-year-old son Robin to be medicated even after he acts out in school. “It’s a book about empathy for diversity—for some way of finding common community and common cause with people who are very different than us,” Powers said. The book centres around dialogues between the boy and his father on a wide range of issues, including Robin’s deeply held opposition to the extinction of so many animal species in the 21st century. Like with the author’s previous book, Overstory, which was about humans’ relationship with nature, Powers includes a great deal of scientific information in Bewilderment. 8
THE GEORGIA STR AIGHT
OCTOBER 14 – 21 / 2021
Richard Powers hopes that Bewilderment helps readers gain empathy for others who are different. Photo by Dean D. Dixon.
This time, he delves into astrobiology because it’s Theo’s job. Plus, there’s an extensive section on decoded neurofeedback, which is a new technique relying on artificial intelligence to induce knowledge by activating parts of the brain. “In the book I end up calling it an empathy machine,” Powers said. “The possibilities for that technique are still wide open because they’ve only been experimenting with it for a short period of time.”
He communicates this information in concise sentences with an accessible vocabulary. Bewilderment also includes short chapters, almost vignettes in some instances. And the dialogue is devoid of quotation marks—Theo’s words appear in Roman text whereas the words of his wife, Alyssa, and Robin appear in italics. “I think about readers’ comprehension and powers of empathy and identification all the time,” Powers explained. “Every decision that goes into structuring and voicing a book is done with an eye toward the possible impact that it will have on a reader.” He quipped that he’s been writing for almost 40 years, so he’s “finally learning things after decades and decades”. His last book was very ambitious, close to 600 pages and unfolding through several characters over centuries. Bewilderment, on the other hand, is less than half that length and is dominated by Theo’s first-person narration. “It’s a little bit like a piano sonata after writing a symphony,” Powers commented. “Both of those forms have the possibility of creating different kinds of effect in the reader.” He realizes that some readers might skip over the astrobiology and simply focus on the father’s struggle to protect his son. “I would be perfectly fine with that,” Powers said. “I do think the simplification in the style and the paring back of different kinds of literary devices…was a deliberate attempt on my part to make it a story that had a kind of fablelike universality to it.” g Richard Powers will speak at the Vancouver Writers Fest, which runs from October 18 to 24.
