What we’re reading Wednesday: Emma Donoghue’s ‘Room’

Room by Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown • $24.99 • September 13, 2010

As a longtime fan of Emma Donoghue, I was eager to read Room the moment I heard about it. I took a copy home over the weekend, but didn’t have a chance to pick it up until Sunday night. My plan was to read “just a few pages” before bed. An hour and a half later I had to force myself to put it down. Not since The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time have I been so compelled by a child narrator: just-turned-five Jack’s account of his life as a captive in an 11 x 11-foot room with his mother is especially powerful because for him, it is not a nightmare. Thanks to his imaginative and loving mother, he is as close to normal as a child raised without other contact can be.

Room is all the more troubling because so much is left to the reader’s imagination, which must fill in the gaps of Jack’s understanding. In this excerpt, Ma has just told Jack about her family.

“Can they come here sometime for real?”

“I wish they could,” she says. “I pray for it so hard, every night.”

“I don’t hear you.”

“Just in my head,” says Ma.

I didn’t know she prays things in her head where I can’t hear.

“They’re wishing it too,” she says, “but they don’t know where I am.”

“You’re in Room with me.”

“But they don’t know where it is, and they don’t know about you at all.”

That’s weird. “They could look on Dora’s Map, and when they come I could pop out at them for a surprise.”

Ma nearly laughs but not quite. “Room’s not on any map.”

“We could tell them on a telephone, Bob the Builder has one.”

“But we don’t.”

“We could ask for one for Sundaytreat.” I remember. “If Old Nick stops being mad.”

“Jack. He’d never give us a phone, or a window.” Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. “We’re like people in a book, and he won’t let anybody else read it.”

Watch for an interview in our September issue. Will you read Room? What are you reading this week?