by Emma Donoghue $24.99; Little, Brown and Company; 321 pages
In 2008, 42-year-old Elisabeth Fritzl revealed to police in the Austrian town of Amstetten that she had been held captive by her father, Josef, for 24 years. Over that period, Fritzl repeatedly raped and abused his daughter, forcing her to give birth to seven children in total.
The story and its nightmarish details consumed the world for months. It, and similar cases, prompted the Irish-Canadian lesbian writer Emma Donoghue to write Room, a novel about the abduction of a young college student by a man we will only know as "Old Nick." But while much of the media coverage around these true-life stories has focused on what the women went through, few have discussed the children.
Room is written from the perspective of Jack, and we only know his mother as "Ma." Jack is fivethe novel begins with a birthday celebrationand has never known the outside world, having been born here. He and his mother are confined to a room, 11 feet by 11 feet, fitted with the bare necessities to which they give names, without corresponding articles: Blanket, Bed, Door. Through the last, Nick comes by, carefully closing it behind him via an automatic system, bearing food and the occasional gift for Jack, whom he is never allowed to see. On most nights, he rapes Ma on Bed; she has given up registering protest. Jack lies inside Wardrobe, listening to the sounds that he doesn't understand; he simply wants to get back to sleep: "I put Blanket over my head and press my ears not to hear. I don't want to count the creaks but I do."
Such chilling details combine with touches of humor. Eventually, Jack and Ma plot a way for him to escape. Jack, who has never had his hair cut, is able to connect with a sympathetic stranger who grows suspicious of Nick's connection to him, and asks, "Is your little girl okay?" To which, Jack responds, in his head, "What little girl?"
Room succeeds in its voicing of Jack's world and his unique perspective on it. Donoghue crystallizes Jack's experiences in a minimalist way, and we learn more about him through his interactions with the world and others than through long soliloquies. Ma makes sure that her child has an understanding of language and sensory perception, a difficult task under the circumstances. She uses every book made available to them to school Jack, and is constantly devising games to keep his mind alert. As a result, Jack's reading ability and vocabulary outpace that of the average five-year-old. And yet, when they are finally rescued and returned to the outside world, he struggles to comprehend the basics, like stairways, choosing to navigate those by sitting and sliding up and down.
Room is and engaging and absorbing tale, but Donoghue falters when she tries to overlay the story with social commentary. When a television interviewer probes Ma with questions about her ordeal, she launches into a diatribe about slavery being common and the fact that, "in America, we've got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells…Some of them for more than twenty years." While it warms my prison activist heart to see such a statement in a novel about an abducted child, the speech feels awkward and forced, as if Donoghue is unsure that her story could sustain its force without making itself socially relevant. She is right to be concerned. Room is a riveting novel, and its narrator emerges as a memorable character; it was on the long list for the Booker Prize. Jack is not unique as a child narrator in literatureDavid Copperfield's early years come to mind. But Room's trouble lies precisely in the fact that Donoghue strains too hard to make Jack believable. His voice is authentic, but the larger story, placed so burdensomely upon his tiny shoulders, seems more gimmicky than engrossing; there's not much beyond the fact that a child narrates it. This is a book you might read to see the effect of Donoghue's craft, but it's not likely to be a book you return to.