TUESDAY, OCTOBER 26 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
early September, an employee told
Chris to be patient for just a few
more days while they set up the
display. The next time he was in
the store, Chris spied an Inferno in
a roped-off, employees-only area,
and asked a different employee if
he could have it. She shrugged and
said yes. He had to order an extra-
large Lyft to get it home.
Dai sy is convinced that their
newest decoration has staying
power. “It’ll probably be a family
heirloom,” she says.
“The 12-foot skeleton’s just
iconic. It’s a s keleton. You can do
whatever the hell you want with
it,” says Anthony Capobianco, 35, a
Columbus, Ohio, resident who hasfour skellies and, now, two Infer-
nos in his macabre menagerie.
At the forefront of the giant
skeleton arms race you’ll find
Alan Perkins, 37, of Olmsted Falls,
Ohio.
Going large on Halloween is
kind of Perkins’s thing. Every year
he does a huge display: In past
years he’s built pirate ships, a Lego
Batmobile and even a realistic-
looking plane crash. This year, he
decided to build a skeleton so
humongous that it shifted the
scale of skeleton-themed decor by
yet another order of magnitude.
Perkins bought Styrofoam
sheets and hand-carved them to
make arms and a skull about sixtimes the size of the giant Home
Depot skeleton. (For reference:
The eye is made out of an exercise
ball.) He posed the extremities so
they appear to protrude from his
house, grasping at the 12-footer as
if it were a doll.
The whole project took him
more than a month to complete.
But the rewards are manifest: “I
think I might have the largest
skeleton,” he says. “If somebody
has a bigger one, I haven’t seen it.”
The 12-foot skeletons are still
large, regardless. And for second-
year owners who didn’t leave
theirs up all year long, storing the
bones is not quite as simple as
stashing string lights or trashingjack-o-lanterns.
Michelle Soliman, 38, and her
husband, David, stored their two
bonechildren in an undeveloped
elevator shaft in their house in
New Orleans.
“We have, literally, a closet full
of skeletons,” says Soliman.
“We’re going to have to get a
storage unit,” says Shauna Hardy,
41, of Warner Robins, Ga.
Hardy’s human daughter, Dy-
lan, is obsessed with skeletons.
Last year, “She had a little three-
foot skeleton and she treated it
like a baby doll,” says Hardy. “She
would carry it around and put it in
her stroller.” So imagine 3-year-
old Dylan’s excitement this yearserved social detail. Her emotion-
al engagement with her charac-
ters and her themes makes “The
Book of Form and Emptiness” as
compelling as it is occasionally
unwieldy.
During his last year of junior
high, the voices Benny hears be-
come so insistent that he flips out
in class, pounding on a window-
pane that is crying because a bird
hit it, and winds up in the pediat-
ric psychiatric unit at the local
children’s hospital. There he
meets an older girl who calls her-
self the Aleph and enjoys subvert-
ing the hospital staff’s efforts to
normalize their patients. Benny is
intrigued by the slips of white
paper she hands out with Fluxus-
like directives that urge new per-
spectives on reality. ( The question
of what is real, first prompted by
BOOK WORLD FROM C1
the voices he hears, echoes
through the novel.) He’s even
more intrigued after he’s dis-
charged and finds a note from the
Aleph in his pocket: “Come to the
Library.” There, in the mysteri-
ously powerful Bindery, Benny’s
journey reaches a surreal crisis.
Anabelle’s crisis is all too real.
She’s immobilized by grief for herdead husband and fear of losing
her job and her home. The only
thing that makes her feel better is
buying things: teapots, snow
globes, whatever. The stuff piling
up in the house isn’t entirely her
fault; the media-monitoring com-
pany for which she scans print
articles has shut its offices and
sent her to work from home, in-
structing her to save the paper
sources as an archive. Her landla-
dy’s grasping son takes the
mounting mess as an excuse to
threaten her with eviction. Anna-
belle tries to follow the advice
tendered in “Tidy Magic: The An-
cient Zen Art of Clearing Your
Clutter and Revolutionizing Your
Life,” a book that jumps into her
cart during a shopping spree, but
she’s overwhelmed by the massive
cleanup required.
The Zen teachings seamlessly
integrated into the story line ofOzeki’s previous novel, “A Tale for
the Time Being,” here seem a
slightly redundant addition to the
chorus of voices urging us to see
the desolation manifest in our
mania for possessions and the
terrible consequences of viewing
the Earth’s bounty as raw materi-
al to be exploited for human gain.
The Aleph makes glass globes
memorializing catastrophes such
as Hurricane Katrina and the 2011
Japanese earthquake and tsu-
nami to illustrate the horrors of
“disaster capitalism” and con-
sumer culture. “We are our plan-
et, and we must love it complete-
ly,” preaches her mentor Slavoj, “a
super famous poet back in Slove-
nia,” now homeless and wheel-
chair-bound in this unnamed
West Coast city. The Book chimes
in, decrying the “social hierarchy
of matter” created by people to
place “the Made,” things shapedby human hands, above “the Un-
made,” things that exist in nature.
“In the beginning,” the Book
grieves, “every thing mattered.”
It’s unclear how this call to
revere all objects relates to the
Book’s equally fervent denuncia-
tion of the way humans have
overloaded the planet with trash.
With so many philosophical balls
in the air, Ozeki’s ideas are some-
times as inchoate as the metaphor
of form and emptiness she peri-
odically invokes but never entire-
ly elucidates. Like all artists, her
flaws are intertwined with her
strengths; she embraces complex-
ity and contradiction. The Aleph
and Slavoj voice legitimate criti-
cisms of the social order, but she’s
a troubled, drug-abusing teen and
he’s an aging alcoholic. Annabelle
is irritatingly hapless, but she can
display unexpected resourceful-
ness and toughness. Benny iswincingly vulnerable when he
pines for the Aleph, delightfully
sassy when he spars with the
Book. The Book itself has a mar-
velous voice: adult, ironic, affirm-
ing at every turn the importance
of books as a repository of hu-
manity’s deepest wisdom and
highest aspirations.
The human drama Ozeki crafts
comes to a satisfying conclusion;
Benny and Annabelle work and
grow to achieve their measured
happy endings. The larger issues
their stories raise remain unre-
solved, because there are no easy
resolutions in life — or in the
challenging kind of art practiced
in “The Book of Form and Empti-
ness.”
[email protected]Wendy Smith is the author of “Real
Life Drama: The Group Theatre and
America, 1931-1940.”I f a book could talk, what would it say? Author Ruth Ozeki has some ideas.
Ruth OzekiSHAUNA HARDYHold up, Gerry — you bought a
Ford F-150 just so you could trans-
po rt giant skeletons?
“That’s right. Yes.”
Along with the two additional
skellies, Harrod bought an Infer-
no — Home Depot’s own attempt
at escalation.
“It’s like, you’ve always got to
one-up yourself every year,” says
Lance Allen, decorative holiday
merchant at Home Depot. “So that
is going to be the challenge of that
item.”
Heavy is the head that sources
and imports the gigantic skull!
Allen is responsible for all of this.
He is the man who blessed us with
a taller set of femurs than Hallow-
een celebrators knew they want-
ed. Amid last year’s skeleton craze,
Allen understood that recaptur-
ing the magic would not be easy.
Instead of going taller, Home
Depot went fleshier.
The Inferno resembles the orig-
inal 12-foot skeleton, but at a
slightly less-advanced stage of de-
composition. Its frame is still
thick with sinew, and there’s some
kind of membrane around its
chest cavity, which lights up. Also,
instead of a human skull, the In-
ferno’s head is a pumpkin, and its
legs are stalks.
It’s harder to find in stores in
certain areas, which has made the
Inferno an in stant status symbol
in the giant skeleton-owning com-
munity.
“We felt like we had to up the
ante this year,” says Daisy Hugen-
berger.
She and her husband, Chris,
would visit their Boston-area
Home Depot every few days or so,
pestering employees about when
they expected new inventory. In
BONES FROM C1 when her parents set up a 12-foot-
er in their front yard.
Then things escalated.
“Our other daughters were like,
‘Well, if Dylan gets a skeleton, we
want a skeleton,’ ” says Hardy.
She has five children. She now
owns five skeletons and two Infer-
noes, which represent her and her
husband in their front-yard skel-
eton family — a total investment
of more than $2,400.
The sacrifices people make for
their (skeleton) children. When
Valerie Hitchcock, 41, moved from
Reno, Nev., to North Little Rock,
Ark., in March, moving vans were
in short supply because of t he
pandemic, and she couldn’t get
the bigger truck she needed for all
her stuff.
Her 12-foot skeleton made the
trip. Her dining room furniture
didn’t.
Are gigantic skeletons just part
of life now? How much longer can
the arms race continue? What
does this es-skell-ation mean for
2022? Will we live to see a 15-foot
skeleton? A 20-footer? A 12-foot
Frankenstein’s monster? (This is a
popular request on Facebook.) A
12-foot animatronic statue of Da-
vid S. Pumpkins? (Nobody is ask-
ing for this.)
Lance Allen, the Home Depot
decorations guy, refuses to say
how far the company is planning
to push this thing. But he does say
the product lineup is already set
for next year.
“I do think we’re going to step
our game up,” he says.
Hardy, the Georgia mother of 12
(five kids, five skeletons, two In-
fernos), is pretty sure where this is
going for her family.
“We will probably just buy more
skeletons.”
[email protected]
Impressive work for a skeleton crew during a pandemic
DAVID SOLIMAN
TOP: Shauna Hardy’s daughter, Dylan, with the extended family of skeletons. A BOVE LEFT: Jake Levin threw his disapproving HOA
a bone by dressing up his skeleton for holidays throughout the year. ABOVE RIGHT: David and Michelle Soliman’s “Kraken” house.JAKE LEVIN