Room
by Emma Donoghue
Summary
Jack is five years old, and Room, a locked backyard shed with a skylight, a bed, a wardrobe, and a television, is the entire world he has ever known. His mother, called only Ma, has raised him there since his birth, keeping secret from him that seven years earlier a man he knows only as Old Nick abducted her at nineteen and has held her captive ever since, visiting most nights while Jack hides inside the wardrobe. Ma tells Jack that everything he sees on television is make believe, a lie that protects him from grief over a world he cannot reach, until she decides, once Old Nick's mounting debts convince her he might kill them both, that Jack is old enough to help her escape. She teaches him to feign illness and play dead, wraps him in a rug, and trusts Old Nick to carry what he believes is a corpse out to be buried; Jack squirms free from the moving truck, flags down a passing stranger, and leads police back to Room in time to free Ma. Old Nick is arrested and charged with kidnapping and rape. Ma's parents have divorced in her absence, and her father cannot bring himself to look at the grandson born of her captivity, a rejection that wounds Ma nearly as much as anything Old Nick did to her. Overwhelmed by reporters and a talk show host who all but blames her for staying alive, Ma attempts suicide and is hospitalized while Jack stays with his grandmother. The novel ends gently: mother and son, now settled into their own apartment, return to Room one last time, and Jack, expecting to feel something, instead notices how small and ordinary it has become, and says a real goodbye to it.
Donoghue tells the entire story through Jack's five year old vocabulary and logic, a choice that turns Room's horror sideways: readers understand the abuse in the gaps of what Jack cannot, while Jack experiences the outside world, sunlight, other children, a moving car, as the genuinely bewildering ordeal. The device asks real patience in early chapters, when Jack's flat, literal narration keeps the reader outside his mother's terror, but it pays off completely once Room is behind them, when Jack's confusion about doors, crowds, and strangers becomes the most vivid account of trauma in the book.
Historical Context & Significance
No award for adult literary fiction was designed with a story like this in mind, yet Room reached deep into that year's prize field anyway. It made the 2010 Booker Prize shortlist, losing to Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, and the following year it was longlisted and then shortlisted for the Orange Prize, losing to Tea Obreht's The Tiger's Wife. It did win two prizes outright: the 2010 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize in Canada and the 2011 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for the Canada and Caribbean region. Donoghue has said the idea began with the real case of Felix, the young son born to Elisabeth Fritzl during the decades her father held her captive in an Austrian cellar, a story that shaped the premise but not the plot or the characters, all invented.
The novel's afterlife has run mostly through Donoghue's own hands. She wrote the screenplay herself for Lenny Abrahamson's 2015 film adaptation, which starred Brie Larson in a performance that won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and later adapted the book again as a stage play that opened at London's Theatre Royal Stratford East in 2017. Both adaptations answer honestly to a book that, on the page, never received the single prize that would have made it an outright winner.