Be careful not to mistreat your books because they might talk back! Ozeki's novel follows the story of adolescent Benny who begins to hear voices after his father's death. He senses that these are coming from the inanimate objects around him. So he frequently takes refuge in a library because books are better behaved than other things. His widowed mother is naturally very worried about her son. She also grapples with her own sense of loneliness, being made redundant from her job and a hoarding problem. There's also a looming threat from Benny's school, counsellors and social workers to take him away and medicate him. Both mother and son meet some figures and encounter literature which inspires them to question their relationship with society, material possessions and reality itself. As with her novel “A Tale for the Time Being”, Ozeki draws in concepts of Zen Buddhism to encourage her characters and readers to ponder meaningful philosophical questions.
Though the concept of this novel about talking objects sounds quite whimsical it takes seriously the emotional strife of a struggling single mother and her troubled teenage son. There are some truly heartbreaking scenes where she desperately tries to connect with her boy and sooth him only to be rebuffed as he's embarrassed and feels misunderstood. While I did find this involving I often questioned the necessity of Ozeki's narrative device where the book becomes a character itself. Benny grows increasingly frustrated with the way it tells the story – especially when it gets into embarrassing detail about his mother's personal life. Certainly this is a creative approach for trying to convey Benny's experience of the world, but I sometimes found it detracted from my engagement with the story.
Similarly, there are parts of the book which felt like overt diatribes about materialism and consumer culture. It's not that I disagreed with Ozeki's points but they felt didactic because her lessons took prominence over her characters in some sections. This was especially true for an artistic character who calls herself The Aleph. Though I found it fun how she devised a game of planting clues in various library books to form a trail for readers to follow, she frequently preaches about her beliefs in a way which felt too pointed. The mother also sometimes came across as overly naïve as if she was simply created as a receptacle for the wisdom that the author wanted to impart. Perhaps I wouldn't have taken such umbrage with these issues if the novel weren't so long as it didn't feel like it needed to be over five hundred pages. I did enjoy many parts of the book. I just wish it had stuck more to the emotional core of the story rather than creating so many flourishes.
