[Little, Brown, and Co; 2010]

by Virginia Smith

In a way, it’s almost too bad that Emma Donoghue’s Room ended up as one of the most talked about books of 2010, even though it was eminently deserving of the attention. Ever since its August release, it’s been close to impossible to avoid reviews (like this one) that immediately give away the book’s most pivotal plot point – that the five-year-old narrator Jack and his mother (“Ma”) were actually being held in “Room,” a glorified cell, by Jack’s father, who was also his mother’s kidnapper, captor, and serial rapist.

It’s a reality that unfolds piece by piece over the course of Room’s early chapters, and I can only guess how powerful the effect would be as a reader coming to the material fresh, finding out slowly why Jack’s understanding of the world is always just a little bit off in spite of his obvious intelligence. Luckily, Donoghue has crafted a book with many, many more layers to it than the shock value of its SVU-ready premise.

The early details of their captivity and Ma’s elaborate methods of entertaining and educating her son are engrossing, but the book’s most interesting moments come once the pair manages to make it out of Room and into the real world. There is endless ground for Donoghue to cover here, and she more than does it justice—Ma is suicidal and virtually paralyzed with depression, Jack secretly wishes he had never had to leave in the first place, and the people around them either walk on eggshells or pry for sordid details, often both at once. Eventually Donoghue deals directly with the morbidly fascinating nature of the plot line, in a manner that is characteristically funny, accurate, and horrifying—after Jack and Ma are released, a lawyer advises Ma to capitalize and write a book, explaining that “the whole living-on-less thing, it couldn’t be more zeitgeisty.”

For a work that serves in part as an incredible testament to maternal determination, the details of Room are brutally honest and never close to saccharine, which mitigates what might otherwise be the grating device of narrating from Jack’s stunted perspective. Instead of flitting around the novel re-awakening the adults in his life to the hidden beauty in a world he is only just discovering, more often than not, Jack irritates them with his total lack of social understanding. In her ninth novel, Donoghue is a smart enough writer to know that these kinds of moments create a more tangible sense of closeness between her readers and her characters, all but guaranteeing that they’ll stay with you to the end of this unexpected meditation on voyeurism, relationships, and the nature of recovery.


 
 
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