media res

In the discussions of this novel recently, one of the topics that kept coming up was the role of the media in the novel, and whether or not we as readers are inevitably playing a similar role. Of all the subtle social critiques embedded in this novel, I think this is the most hilariously ironic one: Donoghue must have known that most people who read this book would be lured in by the tantalizing plot descriptions and probably didn’t want to admit it to themselves. For our situation in this class that particular aspect might not seem to be as applicable, since were assigned to read this book, rather than choosing it out of lurid curiosity, but there are still many ways Donoghue tries to get the reader to contemplate their role as consumers of the story as they’re reading it.  

From the beginning, the reader is strongly allied with Ma and Jack. We get a first-hand view of Ma’s incredible success at raising him in impossible circumstances, and after so long with constant details of their captivity, it’s hard not to bristle at every poorly-thought-out remark or insensitive question Ma and Jack encounter after escaping Room. A reporter with a way to critique Ma’s parenting technique might make for a juicy story but the reader realizes that, as Ma says, they “don’t know the first thing about it.” It’s an uncomfortable revelation for the reader since we’ve all undoubtedly been the consumers of these types of sensationalist stories from the media without really considering the implications for the people involved.

I find Donoghue’s way of using the media to make the reader critique their own actions especially interesting because it reminds me of The White Boy Shuffle that some people read in African American Lit this fall. The basic idea of that book, for people who weren’t in that class, is that Gunnar Kaufman is a genius poet and basketball player who ends up so frustrated with white people that he ends up facilitating a vast suicide plot with all the other black people in America. The sly part of the book is that Gunnar is especially frustrated with how the white people enjoy reading his poetry and watching him play basketball, but don’t value him as a person; and the reader, by the end of the book, is forced to confront the question of whether they, too, are only interested in Gunnar for his life’s entertainment value rather than seeing him as an actual person. In this way, the white world looking at Gunnar is really similar to the media’s fascination with Ma and Jack.

Obviously this is kind of a flawed analogy because Gunnar’s struggle against systematic oppression is very different from Ma and Jack’s experience with the media exploiting their story, but it is just interesting to me how there are a lot of parallels. In both situations there doesn’t really seem to be that much inherently immoral about the situation – what’s wrong with appreciating some good poetry, or a fascinating story? – and there are probably good intentions behind most of what is happening, but when you look at it from the perspective of the person it’s affecting, you realize just how dehumanizing it really is. It’s also even more complicated because there doesn’t really seem to be a simple solution: it wouldn’t be better to ignore Ma and Jack’s story completely, or to shun Gunnar Kaufman’s poetry. It’s uncomfortable, as a reader, because we all recognize ourselves doing the same thing, and by reading the novel it’s almost like we’re still doing the very action the novel is critiquing. 

jack

I will begin this blog post with a tragic, but self-inflicted, story: when I was buying all my textbooks over the summer, I completely spoiled Room for myself by reading a ton of reviews about it online (in my defense: the description of this novel on every book-purchasing website is the most suspenseful thing I’ve ever seen and really I had no choice but to try and satisfy my curiosity without actually reading the entire book itself. but I digress.). So I ended up approaching this novel with a somewhat biased and also very confused mindset, because everyone who read this book seemed to either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it. The main controversy was clearly Jack’s narration: people saw it as either charming, or infuriating; a sophisticated and nuanced view of the situation, or one that was both ineffective and utterly tone-deaf. I’m not a huge fan of chattering five-year-olds and even less a fan of books that resort to cheesy, contrived ways of seeming unique, so I was very prepared to agree with the latter of those armchair literary connoisseurs and really hate this book. But now that we’ve read almost half of the story, I think Jack’s narration is actually a very interesting and effective way of presenting this novel.

One of the main objections people seem to have is that Jack’s perception of the world makes it hard to tell what’s going on, and that because Jack is only five years old, his narration can’t properly address the emotional depth of this novel. But I think that’s a very shallow way of looking at it. Jack may see everything through a very limiting worldview, but the author also does an impressive job of letting enough clues slip through for the astute reader to get an idea of what’s really happening. The daily ritual of “Scream,” for example, is a perfectly normal part of Jack’s daily life, but for the reader it’s one of the first signs that something’s very off about this situation; when Ma and Jack decide to measure Room, another fun and innocent game for Jack, the reader becomes aware of how small their living space really is. Ma’s reactions to seemingly innocuous events, too, which Jack drops into the narrative as barely noticeable sidenotes, serve to reveal the impending danger that constantly occupies her mind.

Especially in the first few chapters, this increasingly sinister ambiguity revealed in glimpses by Jack’s blithely innocent narration makes the emotional context for the novel even more vivid, rather than diminishing it as so many angry Goodreads reviewers would make it seem. From the very beginning, the reader is forced to be in a position that’s almost the same as Jack’s. We start out with a portrait of a strange but apparently effective family arrangement, and Jack’s matter-of-fact way of narrating it makes the reader instinctively accept it without suspicion. But once the reader is aware of the actual situation, it’s almost more unnerving to look at it from Jack’s perspective than it would be to see it from Ma’s. If the reader only saw Jack’s experiences secondhand, it would be easy to dismiss Jack as just a little kid and not take the time to really understand the implications of his 11x11 foot childhood; he could easily appear to be just another obstacle to complicate Ma’s efforts at survival and escape. But instead, the reader is constantly bombarded with reminders, often in the form of Jack’s endearingly flawed syntax, that Jack’s entire consciousness is fundamentally altered by living in Room.

By the same token, I think a novel narrated by Ma could risk being too similar to countless other thrilling and heroic tales of escape. And if people think Jack’s narration is “tone-deaf,” an attempt to accurately represent Ma’s experiences through her own narrative could be even more so: what could you really do, as an author, to properly describe Ma’s emotions for the past seven years? Instead, with Jack as the narrator, only dropping an occasional hint of what Ma’s going through, the reader has to find ways to imagine for themself what Ma’s life is like. It almost forces the reader to put themselves in Ma’s position, watching Jack, to figure out how she feels, a much more emotionally intense way of understanding the situation than just reading an author’s vision of Ma’s life on the page.

Apart from how Jack’s narration wasn’t appropriate for the emotional content of the novel, the other resounding objection in the reviews was that Jack’s voice was “annoying,” and I think this concern is perhaps even more shallow and short-sighted than the others. I’m reminded of Jefferson’s journal entry in A Lesson Before Dying, and pretty much the entirety of  As I Lay Dying: both were similarly “annoying” and disorienting to read, but there were important literary reasons for that, and the unconventional narrative was a large part of what made the novel so interesting. Jack’s penchant for unnecessarily capitalized nouns and ambiguous descriptions of plot elements is confusing, but without his narrative, our understanding of this novel would be very different.