Fundamentally, this book is interested in two things (imo): Agency, and how we construct our reality. It does this in several ways. On the surface, this is a story about Benny Oh and his mother, Annabel. We go from love story printed in memory, viewing Annabel and her husband’s courtship, right on to the death of the husband and Benny having mental health issues and a struggling Annabel doing absolutely everything she can to provide for him, make and hold a home, mourn her husband, and try to divine who she is amongst these challenges and her rejiggering of identity.

But it’s also a story about stories. Who gets to construct them and what the nature of a story actually is. In doing so, it begs the age old question: What is reality?

Benny hears objects and descends into spirals of mania depending on what they objects tell him, but also how people react to him. One voice warns him of danger, another seems to be his self loathing given voice, and another an internal, ostensibly, inner poet.

And then there is the book, which in a kind of post-modern step, is the “thing” narrating Benny’s life and story, and the thing we consume. It breaks the fourth wall at times, given separate chapters entirely, and will expound of the nature of what it is we are consuming—or else simply function as storycraft itself, dropping exposition or foreshadowing or quipping about the genre or trope happening.

This, initially, feels like a spinning wheel but does come together, I felt. Mostly because I like what it is examining, though it centres the trials and tribulations predominant Benny goes through. What I liked the most about this was the the vector of discussing mental health. We don’t really know, in the end, how much surrealism is in here because we are actively looking at what reality even is. The mental health professionals interacting with Benny assume everything he says is not valid because he does speak to objects sometimes. But not everything he converses with is. For instance, he falls in love (maybe) with an older girl whose artist name is The Aleph, but is both the embodiment and a simulacrum of the story by Borges of the same name. Yet because he calls her by that name, people assume she is not real.

And in some ways she isn’t, right? After all, we, ourselves are constructs of understanding through the vector of telling ourselves the story of… ourselves. So we need input from other people in other to see ourselves and adjust our story to be something approaching accurate to other people. But what happens when the people who have agency over aspects of your life—who have the authority to put you in a mental ward, kick you out of your house, or otherwise assert a kind of dominance over you when you’re vulnerable—give you information as they see it, benefiting them. The story of capitalism and the story of The American Dream, which you do not fit into?

Our society likes to think of stories as entertainment; a product of capitalistic anti-intellectualism and the inability to really ascertain “value” in art. And yet this book… within the book, narrating this, tells us that stories are the primary forces of constructing identity and our social reality. That a book, or narrative, story, etc. is maybe the primary animal on earth; the apex predator that colonizes our minds and propagates itself within us, disseminates itself using us as a vector.

Or, at least, that’s what I heard? What did you hear?

(A small edit here: if you consume the audiobook, while the narrator is quite good he also speaks in dialect and changes cadence for everyone—which is good, overall—but I hate it when narrator do dialect, especially for other ethnicities, such as Asian, which this person does. And also makes Annabel sound really sort of airy and dopey and lispy and overly feminine, so I almost gave this 4 stars, actually. Something to consider).