Room

As someone who has dabbled with writing fiction, I know that if an idea crossed my mind to write a novel narrated by a 5-year-old boy, I would do my best to quash it. That Emily Donoghue's Room is so amazingly good and that it is narrated by a boy of that age isn't the only thing distinctive about it, though.

Jack is the narrator of our tale. He has lived his entire life in an 11 foot square room with his mother. We eventually learn that she was kidnapped seven years earlier and has been locked up in modified garden shed by her captor, who is also Jack's father. Jack knows him as "Old Nick," who provides minimal comforts, which Jack calls "sundaytreats."

Jack thinks the entire world is in that room. He personalizes the objects in the room, and they are identified as proper nouns, like Rug and Table and Lamp. They have a television, but Jack doesn't grasp that there's anything outside of Room--what's on TV is fictional. He refers to the different channels as "planets," and they have no connection to his reality. When his mother decides to level with him he's amazed that he's been deceived.

I can't discuss the last half of the book, as I read the book not knowing what would happen and I wouldn't want anyone else to, either. But the book touches upon the essence of consciousness--for Jack, the room is a universe, and there is no outside. Each of us creates our own universe, on a larger scale, but still with its limits. Ma wants to be free, to see her parents again, to go back to her old life, but Jack is afraid to leave the comforts of Room, not realizing it's a prison.

The book wouldn't succeed without the great voice of Jack. He thinks like a 5-year-old, but he's smarter than most. Some of what he thinks is hilariously funny, because he takes everything literally. When a woman calls him a doll, he thinks, "Why she call me a doll?" He's still being breast-fed--his mother never saw the point in stopping--and he indicates he wants feeding by saying "I want some," and is a connoisseur between the left and the right. By the end you really don't want the book to be over--you want to know what will become of him.

One wonders if Donoghue was inspired by the real-life case of Jaycee Dugard, who was kidnapped at age 11 and bore two children to her captor.