Emma Donoghue | The Remainder Table

From the fall 2012 VPL book sale.

Read in May 2013.

Here’s one I probably don’t need to say much about. You’ve either read it or you’ve read about it. My question going in was “will it live up to the hype?” The answer: yes.

Jack, the narrator, is five years old. His mother, who he calls Ma, is 26. They live in a 12×12 room, which turns out to be a garden shed (spoiler? I think that horse has left the barn). Jack thinks Room is the whole world and everything else is “TV” (imaginary). Jack calls everything by proper nouns: Bed, Wardrobe, Door. This is partly because there is only one of each of these things in his world. But also, I wondered if it didn’t partly come from the children’s shows he likes to watch. For example, he’s a big fan of Dora, and Dora’s backpack is called Backpack.

Ma has managed to shelter Jack from the reality of their situation, but now that he’s five, he’s starting to ask questions. She decides to tell him the truth. Events start snowballing from there.

What I thought was particularly impressive about Room was the pacing. It starts off at an almost oppressive pace, detailing the minutia of a day in the room. But then just when you start to think “I’m not sure how much more this I can take” Donoghue shifts gears, and the story speeds up to an almost frenetic pace. Finally, she slows it down again, letting readers catch their breaths.

I know some readers didn’t like the story being told in Jack’s voice—they find kid-voices annoying or question the authenticity of his thoughts—but I think to tell this particular story, it had to be from his pov. If it were told from Ma’s pov, it would be a story we’ve heard before. We also have no trouble imagining how we’d feel if we were kidnapped/falsely imprisoned. So telling the story from Ma’s pov sets up a very different narrator/reader dynamic. Jack’s situation is outside the realm of our experience . Readers have to work harder to understand his perspective, not because he’s a child, but because we (with few exceptions) didn’t start off life like Jack did.

tl;dr: It is easy for us to empathize with Ma; we have to work to empathize with Jack.

And that’s why I think the last part, when Jack is suffering from sensory overload, when he wants to go back, is so important. This story is not about freedom, as it would be if it was told from Ma’s pov, but about adjustment. Jack has to adjust the entire framework of his life experience.

It would be convenient, certainly if only I (as an Irishwoman who has lived first in the UK and then in Canada, and writes books set in various parts and centuries of the English-speaking world) could figure out which. Literature is generally classified by nation, and book prizes and many other facets of the publishing-related world too; publicity works most smoothly if a person who lives in X Place has written a book set in X Place. A man at a party, soon after I moved to Canada, warned me darkly that like Brian Moore, I would fall between various stools: never fully appreciated as central to the literary traditions of any of his native lands. That’s probably true – I’m seen as Irish sometimes, Canadian sometimes, even vaguely British sometimes, and I’m probably assumed to be American by the Americans who make up the majority of my readership. But that’s just how it is. I grew up reading books from just about anywhere and I still do; I believe a writer’s imagination carries no passport.

—Emma Donoghue