Room: A Review

"Utterly gripping"

"heart-stopping"

"riveting"

These are just a few of the words reviewers have used in describing Emma Donoghue's 2010 novel Room.

(Mild spoiler alert from here on out.)

Five-year-old Jack's and his Ma's lives are confined to the eleven-foot-square room where Jack was born. To protect him, Ma has raised Jack to believe that "Room" is all there is, that everything in the TV is pretend, that they are the whole world--except for Old Nick, who visits in the night. Narrating, Jack tells how they live, how they exercise, what they eat, what they read, how he learns. Ma has created as full a life as she can for him with what limited resources she has, but she is growing restless and desperate and knows that not even her creativity can survive the situation much longer, though her ingenuity, along with Jack's bravery, does save them from it. The second half of the novel, outside "Room," recounts Ma's adjustment to what life can now be--and what it must be as a result of what she has endured, Jack's first regular interaction with anyone but Ma and his experience of a wider world he has only just learned exists, and Ma's continued fierce protection of her son even as she struggles to reconcile the person she has become with the person she once was.

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I stumbled upon Room in the bookstore and picked it up because of its simple but eye-catching cover:

Room sat on my bookshelf for months until this week when I picked it up and found I couldn't tear myself away, even during rehearsals for the play. (I sat backstage in the sawdust and hay from the set and read until my entrances.) [Note: The copy I have includes an intriguing interview with the author. If you read the book, definitely check out the interview as well.]

Donoghue's elegant, five-year-old prose captured my heart and broke it in one fell swoop: Jack has no idea that there is a world beyond "Room." His way of seeing his world heightens the contrast between the two halves of the book--the first half of confinement and the second half of freedom that seems, to Jack, incredibly suffocating.

The Ma that Jack portrays also has two strikingly different halves. In "Room," she must be all things to Jack. She is mother and teacher and protector. All mothers are these things (ideally, I suppose), but she has no one to help her, no "village," so to speak. She also has no one to be any of these things to her. Jack doesn't understand that Ma is a daughter, too. Jack doesn't even realize Ma has a name besides "Ma." Outside, as Ma tries to maintain her relationship with Jack while simultaneously re-learning how also to be everything else she once was, she shatters. Donoghue does not manipulate the character into a paragon of virtue, all things perfect, all things managed. Ma is real and flawed and, thus, all the more affecting.

Donoghue challenges the media's tendency to sensationalize stories like these. During an interview with Ma, a television host tries to idealize the experience into an exercise in simple living, assumes she understands what Ma must have thought on finding she was pregnant, directs Ma toward the narrative the show wants to tell rather than the truth. Ma won't play the game. She refuses to make herself the untainted heroine but neither will she let them make her into more of a victim.

Most of the sordid details of Ma's ordeal are lost on Jack and absent from the narrative, which might make this novel more accessible to the squeamish and the highly sensitive, but the story is far from simple and happy. It haunts the brain and sends the reader on a dark trip from one prison to a kind of other and finally, hopefully, to freedom.