I can picture myself as an author thinking about my next book. No inspiration has lit a fire under my ass. I haven't been struck by creative lightning. I check out the successful (meaning high sales) writers that I admire and see what they are writing about. I read the papers to see if anything strikes me as novel-worthy. I want to write something socially meaningful. I want to be taken seriously. I read a news story about a man who holds his daughter captive in a basement for 24 years and fathers her children. This could be a novel! Jodi Picoult has made a credible name for herself writing book after best-selling book about curly social issues. Lionel Shriver wrote an immensely popular book about a boy who commits a school massacre from the perspective of his mother. D.B.C. Pierre won a Booker Prize, for heaven sake, writing a story about boy mixed up in a multiple killing rampage. I could write a book about the atrocities committed by a man who kidnaps and encages a woman. But it needs a twist so I will write it in the voice of the small boy who is the child of the keeper and the kept. Fingers on keyboard I begin.
The Room feels just this calculated right from the beginning. It is clever but there is no passion in it. There is a lack of oomph, a lack of intensity that this story needed to keep my interest. The first few pages were interesting but as soon as I needed the story to rise up, pick up pace, ripple, rock and roll it let me down by staying level.. I didn't feel like at any time the story took over from the author's intentions and it never spread its wings and soared.
I love a story that surprises me, that takes me along on an unexpected ride. I don't need shoot-em-up or knock-me-down action. I love words that create moods just as much as I love a character that moves through its novel life with its own personality. The characters in The Room were predictable and measured.
Oh, I have made this novel sound like a huge bore. It’s not. It was short listed for the 2010 Booker Prize so several people think this book has excellent merit. As I have said, it is a clever premise and competently written. It is a little scary saying that a novel that attacks such a sensitive and tricky subject is not up to my snobbish standards. But it’s not.
Donoghue, to her credit, writes a consistent voice in the 5 year old boy, Jack, which grows with his journey from a confined space with no outside influence to the big bad world. He sees his world through innocent eyes and it is sad to watch those eyes lose their innocence slowly. Donoghue covers all the bases of this tricky subject with this novel – the child, the abuse, the escape, the afterlife, the family, the punishment. I just wish it hadn't felt like an interview in a journal. I wish I could have been sucked into the story and spat out the other end. I wish I could have had a much deeper empathy with both mother and child. I wish, by the end of the novel, I knew what it felt like to be locked in a room for all of my life. I would have liked this book to take me to the darker side instead of just showing me where it was.
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