His mother, Annabelle, has her own fraught relationship with stuff, and her material possessions have begun to crowd and overwhelm their house. It follows Benny, a teenager whose father has recently died, as he begins hearing the voices of everything around him. On September 21, Ozeki will publish her fifth book, a novel titled The Book of Form and Emptiness. Her friend and onetime editor Carole DeSanti calls the writer “a goes-to-the-root radical.”
The books don’t come quickly for her (“It’s like pulling teeth,” Ozeki said), but they come heavy with lived experience and knowledge about botany, film production, religion, risk. She writes urgently about the environment - you leave an Ozeki book knowing more about ocean contamination or factory farming - and her novels tend to include a painful parent-child rupture as well as a burbling stream of absurdist humor. Her books are not didactic, but they are useful they’re not mission-driven, but they are richly moral. From that novel, 1998’s My Year of Meats, through All Over Creation, the Booker Prize–shortlisted A Tale for the Time Being, and a memoir called The Face: A Time Code, she has shifted her readers’ way of perceiving what is “normal” through a sort of slow, capillary action. She published her first book when she was 42. Ozeki, now 65, lived at least four lives before she even started writing. There was a great lightness and calm to her Zen precepts come up often in her books and conversation.īut mild she is not. She wore a collarless linen shirt, clogs, and a brass pen on a chain. In my short time there, she offered me two books, cookies, sparkling water, a splash of wine, and melon in a graceful ceramic bowl she made herself. Her home was filled with leggy plants and shy cats. She wouldn’t cut the messy stand of milkweed around her front door because monarch butterflies might need it during their migration. “I am the most conflict-averse person I know,” she said. The director of the Department of Public Works had to tear off the trees’ garlands and robes before the city workers could chop them down.ĭespite the rites, the letters to the editor, the march to City Hall, Ozeki kept assuring me she was mild-mannered. It didn’t work, and at the end of that month, the city sent in cops in flak jackets.
Ozeki and others had recently ordained ten of the trees as fellow priests, complete with full ceremonial rites - a desperate, last-ditch move that had sometimes saved forests in Thailand. All spring and summer, she and her neighbors had been trying to protect a little grove of serious old cherries from the city’s repaving plan. When I visited author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki in Northampton, Massachusetts, in late July, she took me to see the trees.
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