The name Ruth Ozeki as somehow vaguely at the intersection of fiction and dharma floated through my mind for several years before I happened upon a used copy of this novel. The connection between those terms is now a lot less vague. Ozeki writes what we might call 'dharma fiction' -- something halfway between a simple story and a dreaded self-help book. In lesser hands, I expect this would be a terrible combination prone to tumbling either toward the insipid or the preachy. However, Ozeki somehow makes this feel like the most natural genre in the world, a story that doesn't shy away from overt message and teaching, without ceasing to be an inventive and page-turning piece of speculative fiction.
One of the great joys of the novel is the way it portrays ordinary, flawed characters with such a combination of clarity and compassion. Aside from the memory of the mythologized husband killed on the first page, there really isn't a character who gets treated as a paragon of virtue. Real people come in many shapes and sizes, but perfect is not one of them. Every character here frustrates us with their mistakes, and some even tickle us with a tingle of dislike, but all of them, without exception, also naturally arouse our compassion as well. I can't remember the last novel I read where even minor characters seem to feel completely real and whole, despite the fact that they are only lightly sketched and tangential.
The other remarkable aspect of the novel is the canny way it shows us how we're creating a world that's driving us nuts. Normally, one might illustrate this sort of observation through satire Infinite Jest or dark prophecy Brave New World both of which extrapolate our world into a near duplicate of itself that allows us to reflect on it. Ozeki instead chooses to make her point by dividing it into the completely different, even 'deranged', world of Benny -- a world where our things themselves yammer at us incessantly -- and the absolutely mundane world of Annabelle -- a world of hoarded dreams and twenty-four hour incessant news apocalypse. Both worlds are ultimately the same materialist samsara we live in. But where the first sees it **too** clearly, as intolerably close and loud and chaotic, the latter doesn't see it at all, or only through the hazy veil of ignorance about what swimming in this water does to us. Surely, there must be some Middle Way?
One of the great joys of the novel is the way it portrays ordinary, flawed characters with such a combination of clarity and compassion. Aside from the memory of the mythologized husband killed on the first page, there really isn't a character who gets treated as a paragon of virtue. Real people come in many shapes and sizes, but perfect is not one of them. Every character here frustrates us with their mistakes, and some even tickle us with a tingle of dislike, but all of them, without exception, also naturally arouse our compassion as well. I can't remember the last novel I read where even minor characters seem to feel completely real and whole, despite the fact that they are only lightly sketched and tangential.
The other remarkable aspect of the novel is the canny way it shows us how we're creating a world that's driving us nuts. Normally, one might illustrate this sort of observation through satire Infinite Jest or dark prophecy Brave New World both of which extrapolate our world into a near duplicate of itself that allows us to reflect on it. Ozeki instead chooses to make her point by dividing it into the completely different, even 'deranged', world of Benny -- a world where our things themselves yammer at us incessantly -- and the absolutely mundane world of Annabelle -- a world of hoarded dreams and twenty-four hour incessant news apocalypse. Both worlds are ultimately the same materialist samsara we live in. But where the first sees it **too** clearly, as intolerably close and loud and chaotic, the latter doesn't see it at all, or only through the hazy veil of ignorance about what swimming in this water does to us. Surely, there must be some Middle Way?
No comments:
Post a Comment