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Title: Room by Emma Donoghue
Details: Copyright 2010, Little, Brown, and Company
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "To five-year-old Jack, Room is the world. It's where he was born, it's where he and his Ma eat and sleep and play and learn. At night, Ma shuts him safely inside the wardrobe, where Jack is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits.
Room is home to Jack, but to Ma it's the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this eleven-by-eleven-foot space. But Jack's curiosity is building alongside Ma's own desperation-- and she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.
Room is a tale at once shocking, riveting, exhilarating-- a story of unconquerable love in harrowing circumstances, and of the diamond-hard bond between a mother and her child."
Why I Wanted to Read It: Not long after it came out, I saw the 2015 film Room and was shaken and transfixed. The performances throughout, but particularly those of its two leads, Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay, were haunting and brilliant. In reading and researching the making of the film, I found out more about the source novel, particularly the fact the author was inspired by the Fritzl case and that the filmmakers drew inspiration from Jaycee Duggard's kidnapping and captivity. I had always meant to read the book and finally got around to it.
How I Liked It:
Do screen adaptations help or hurt a book? Certainly if the screen adaptation is popular enough, that becomes the version of the story people remember (just ask Alice Hoffman), for better or for worse. I entered this book at a disadvantage, of sorts, since I saw the movie first and loved it. So how does the book fare?
First, meet Jack. The book opens on his fifth birthday and we get an idea of what everyday life is like in Room, the universe he and his mother, Ma, inhabit, complete with various anthropomorphic objects (Rug, Table, Rocker, Meltedy Spoon). While Jack seems to have a pleasant, content existence full of routine, education, and games, his mother is suffering. Enduring nightly visits from their captor Old Nick wherein not only is Ma physically and sexually abused, she's also forced to beg for necessities for herself and Jack (many of which are denied), and things are getting worse. Turns out Old Nick lost his job and not only does that put Ma and Jack's future in jeopardy, it means he's meaner than ever. After memorable visits where he both chokes Ma leaving her badly bruised and injured, and cuts off the power in Room, harming their food supply and killing their houseplant in the freezing cold, Ma starts hatching a plan for escape, and starts telling Jack the truth.
Outside Room is not outer space full of aliens, but is actually the whole world. Ma was abducted when she was nineteen (she's now almost twenty-seven) and kept here ever since, enduring Old Nick. She tried to escape before, and that's why both the toilet has no lid (she hit him with it) and she has a bad wrist (in trying to threaten him to tell her the secret code that unlocks the door to the shed that is Room, he bent her wrist badly). But they hatch a plan and despite several snags and it not going as expected, both Jack and Ma manage to escape and Old Nick is arrested.
But it's not smooth going after the escape. Media hoards descend on both Ma and Jack and Ma must hire an attorney to cover fees of their abduction (extensive therapy, for one). A rocky reunion with Ma's family (which includes her discovering her parents have divorced and her mother remarried; also, her father is horrified by Jack's existence, unable to see him as anything other than the product of his daughter's rape, rather than his grandson) and the pressures of both her newfound fame and recovery send Ma into a spiral and separate her from Jack. As Jack learns how to be a kid outside of Room while he's looked after by his grandmother, Ma heals and they are reunited and start a new life together in a supportive community apartment. They go back with police to visit Room one last time and marvel that it was ever Room, as it's not Room anymore. Jack says goodbye and they leave, presumably leaving Room behind both literally and metaphorically.
I'll say it up front: I'm relieved and delighted to report that this book has absolutely all of the haunting, chilling wonder of the movie. In fact, I was honestly surprised and impressed at how closely the movie followed the book.
As both movie-makers and author attest, this is not intended to be crime fiction. It's not about Old Nick and why he did what he did, or how he did it, necessarily. It's intended to be about wonder and exploration and possibly even the endurance of the human spirit. It's about seeing the world for the first time through Jack's eyes and experiences, and the love and even whimsy in an utterly bleak and hideous situation. Ma's resilience in making this somehow bearable and even nurturing for her child, somehow, and Jack's pleasant and enduring faith and immersion in this bizarre environment and reality are what linger most about the story for me and the fact that this quality apparently made it from the book to the screen should give faith to any screen adaptation.
Which isn't to say that the book isn't slightly different in places from the film, as to be expected whenever there's a change in medium. Some stories were cut out (the fact Ma is adopted, the fact she has a brother, sister-in-law, and a niece who all spend memorable time with Jack, the fact Jack is not Ma's first pregnancy, she had a girl born before Jack with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck and Old Nick did not try to resuscitate her) and some angles have shifted, particularly the characterization of the grandparents, especially Grandma.
But the wonder and key story itself remains intact whether on screen or in words, and so does the author's vision of the world through Jack's eyes, which is absolutely staggering.
Donoghue doesn't pull off everything perfectly; the coverage of their case as witnessed by Jack (bigger in the novel than in the movie) doesn't feel quite as authentic as it would if, say, Gillian Flynn were writing it. But given that that's not really what the story is about, it's barely notable (although for the sake of thoroughness I'm noting it).
A screen adaptation can often wreck a book, it's sad to say, or at least wreck it for those who enjoyed the book. I've had more trouble with screen adaptations than I've had successes. But Room will stay with you and haunt you no matter what version of the story you consume, and it's frankly wonderful to see that the film did the source material so much justice, because it's brilliant.
In the copy I read (a 2015 reissue in promotion of the movie), there's an interview with the author where she's mentions a possible film adaptation:
My other main interest in Room making it to the big screen in a way that would capture its magic without veering off in the direction of either schlock or sentimentality. Watch this space. (Reader's Guide, pg. 6)
How rare is it that such brilliant source material gets what it deserves.
Notable: In both film and novel, Ma is subject to a tense, awkward interview by an insensitive host. In the novel, though, Ma is considerably more vocally political. She mentions she had an abortion at eighteen and it was no big deal, and dislikes the idea that what she's been through is noble:
"All this reverential-- I'm not a saint." Ma's voice is getting louder again. "I wish people would stop treating us like we're the only ones who ever lived through something terrible. I've been finding stuff on the Internet like you wouldn't believe."
"Other cases like yours?"
"Yeah, but not just-- I mean, of course when I woke up in that shed, I thought nobody's ever had it as bad as me. But the thing is, slavery's not a new invention. And solitary confinement-- did you know, in America we've got more than twenty-five thousand prisoners in isolation cells? Some of them for more than twenty years." Her hand is pointing at the puffy-hair woman. "As for kids-- there's places where babies lie in orphanages five to a cot with pacifiers taped into their mouths, kids getting raped by Daddy every night, kids in prisons, whatever, making carpets until they go blind-- "
It's really quiet for a minute. The woman says, "Your experiences have given you, ah, enormous empathy with the suffering children of the world."
"Not just children," says Ma. "People are locked up in all sorts of ways." (pg 235 and 236)
Given that the author makes a point about solitary confinement and prison reform (or abolition, depending on how you look at it) in the interview included in later versions, this seemed like an interesting omission from the film.
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The book manages to be absolutely of its time but without veering into superficial Jodi Picoult territory in a really interestingly authentic way. Some of the songs Ma teaches Jack are '90s pop. She talks about right before she was kidnapped (which would've been in the early 2000s), she was among the first of her friends to have gotten an iPod (the book doesn't mention the device by name, but that's what it is). When Ma gets new clothes after their escape, she's shocked that skinny jeans are the fashion (this is 2010, remember) and is assured that that's the style now. A news program she and Jack catch makes mention of the healthcare reform debate and the midterms.
It's just interesting to see an author reference an era in a way that doesn't feel forced.
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Not sure if all versions have this or if it's special to the reprints, but a list of movies and books are touted as the author's recommendations for further reading and viewing.
They contain the expected (The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, Flowers in the Attic), the unfortunate (Life is Beautiful, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), and the unexpected (Finding Nemo and several Studio Ghibli selections, including Spirited Away and Ponyo). I was interested in seeing We Need to Talk About Kevin since it seems like an drastic inverse of this book (drastic circumstances drive a parent and child apart rather than together).
Final Grade: A
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