Ten Things About Room

Room is the remarkably claustrophobic and shockingly life affirming new novel by Emma Donoghue. The story begins on Jack's fifth birthday. He has never been outside and doesn't even know the real world exists beyond the confines of the sealed 11x11 room that he inhabits with his young mother. She is a kidnapping victim, abducted while in college, and has been held hostage for seven years. Room is about how she has made a life for her growing boy under these harsh conditions. Their windows on their world are a skylight, a television and a handful of books.

Here's what struck me most about this unique piece of fiction:

• Jack's voice is incredible. Donoghue tells this intense tale entirely through the voice of a five-year old boy. He is wise emotionally but simultaneously innocent about the world. His mother has worked hard to educate him and his vocabulary is impressive but realistic. Donoghue immediately creates the voice and the character in the opening lines of the novel. "Today I'm five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in bed in the dark I'm changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. 'Was I minus numbers?'"
  


• On the surface this is a tale of confinement. Mother and son are trapped in the room and never, ever leave. They eat, sleep, exercise in that tiny space. However, Jack sees the room from the inside out. Since he is the narrator, we are able to see the room as an entire world. He sleeps in the wardrobe, they roll up the rug to make an exercise track and he doesn't get bored or depressed any more often than a typical five-year old boy. His mind is spacious. He is happy in that room with his mother.
  


• Jack's mother is one of the great heroine's of recent fiction. Despite being tormented and sexually abused for years by her captor she manages to create a safe haven for her child. Old Nick, the middle age abuser and the boy's father, has never seen Jack. When Old Nick enters the room, Jack is tucked tightly into the wardrobe. He knows the boy exists, but he also knows not to challenge the mother about seeing him. The boy is having an imaginative childhood through the books, stories and television shows that he is experiencing with his mother. Despite the depravity, he is experiencing life more fully than many people.
  


• The escape plan that Jack's mother hatches will be enough to keep any parent reading straight through. Don't start reading it after 9 p.m. if you want to get to sleep. She's relying on her child to outwit her captive. Jack has never been separated from his mother, but now he must try to enter the outside world and carry out a sophisticated plan. "'You forgot Police,' she says. 'Count on your fingers. Sick, Truck, Hospital, Police, Save Ma....My head is tired but Ma says we have to practice the being sick bit, that the most important."
  


• The climax of the book occurs about halfway in. The whole second half of the novel, while good, cannot sustain the tension of the first 150 pages. I would have preferred a shorter book by about 50-75 pages. Life after the room is a bit too pedestrian compared to the originality shown in the room. Surprisingly, life in the room (a complete contrivance) seems natural and real, while the world outside of the room feels a bit contrived.
  


• The media are portrayed as vultures and sycophants in the novel. It feels a bit heavy handed and stereotypical. The worst scene in the novel occurs when an Oprah type interviewer starts asking tough, painful questions of the mother.
  


• Jack believes that what he sees on television is not a representation of the real world. The mother began this conceit so that Jack wouldn't understand the painful reality of their situation. Once he turns five his mother starts trying to prove to him that there is a world outside of their soundproof room. When Jack sees an airplane flying above the wire re-enforced skylight, he begins to understand the concept of outside. "I see it through the honeycomb, the thing so small I think it's just one of those floaters in my eye, but it's not. It's a little line making a thick white streak on the sky." Donoghue does an extraordinary job in letting us experience Jack's changing perception through his eyes.
  


• The novel to some extent is a critique of our materialistic, ultra-busy culture. Jack and his mother have all the time in the world in their room. It may be torture for his mother, but for Jack it allows him time to learn, imagine and play at his leisure. In the outside world people are too caught up in petty concerns to truly experience the world and revel in each others company. I agree with what Donoghue is saying, but I thought the reader could draw their own conclusions. There is a scene with Jack's uncle's family that was the shopping experience from hell. A little subtlety could have gone a long way.
  


• In Aimee Bender's front-page New York Times Book Review article she took issue with the fact that Jack is still being breast fed. It's not for nutritional nourishment, but rather for security and comfort for both mother and child. I found those scenes to be among the most tender and beautiful in the book. How could she possibly have weaned him in those circumstances? What purpose would it have served?
  
• Donoghue ends the novel magnificently. After the somewhat disappointing last 100 pages, the final few are just perfect. I don't want to ruin the scene but I will say that Jack is able to help his mother begin the healing process in a completely believable and emotionally compelling manner.

Happy Hours, Black Minutes

I'm not much of a reader of mysteries. To enjoy mysteries, it seems to me that you've got to spend an inordinate amount of your reading energy guessing the identity of the killer. It's not the way I read. I soak up the setting, revel in the dialogue, look for the quirks in the characters and most of all immerse myself in the writing. The plot is a device to keep the novel moving, but it is often the least important aspect of a book for me.

Martin Solares' debut novel The Black Minutes satisfied all of my demands as a reader and still managed to maintain a suspenseful mystery. I think the Junot Diaz quote on the cover sums up this Mexican crime novel perfectly.

"A breathless, marvelous first novel... This is Latin American fiction at its pulpy phantasmagorical finest... a literary masterpiece masquerading as a police procedural," Diaz proclaims. That's high praise from one of my favorite writers. I was skeptical about whether the novel could possibly live up to that hype.

The Black Minutes begins on a bus ride. Two strangers, a young journalist and a crusty old policeman are sitting next to each other. The reporter is hauled off the bus and questioned at a checkpoint by the head of the judicial police. When the cops start getting rough, the detective rumbles over to them and puts an end to the shenanigans by declaring that the journalist is riding with him. In a way, the two spend the novel together. Detective Ramon Cabrera investigates the murder of Bernardo Blanco. It turns out Blanco was writing a book about a serial killer, the Jackal, from over 20 years ago. As Cabrera investigates Blanco's killing, he reopens the long dormant case.

What separates Solares novel from most other crime fiction is simply the writing and the pacing. Solares creates the murky world of a corrupt Mexican Gulf Coast town. Setting is often a hallmark of crime writing. Dennis Lehane has Boston, Lisa Scottoline has Philadelphia, heck Stephen White has Boulder, but Solares truly inhabits the town of Paracuan, Tamaulipas in a way that is completely unlike what those writers do. He brings to life our times, but also the late 1970s. It's not about real places serving as a backdrop for his characters actions. The town is in the foreground and while what happens in the story isn't exactly in the background, Solares seems more comfortable with atmosphere than plot pyrotechnics.

"They were looking out over the lagoon in Paracuan. At the far end of the immense sheet of water, they could see the horizon and the hills of Nagual. From there, they could make out El Palmar, the area where they found the first girl, but they weren't talking about that," Solares writes during an important moment in the investigation.

Solares doesn't force his action. The story unfolds languorously in fits and starts. There is a love interest, but she isn't the most beautiful woman that the detective has ever seen. There are surprises but they don't change the entire feel of the novel. The twist and turns of the plot can't alter the story because the incredible setting, mood and bottomless corruption that infects the politicians, cops and drug dealers is the novel's DNA.

The Black Minutes is told from multiple perspectives. Cabrera or El Maceton, as he is known, is the main focal point of the contemporary story while Vincente Rangel, the cop who investigated the Jackal is the heart of the nearly 300-page flashback to the 1970s. Within these sections other voices are heard including a Jesuit priest and several other officers. Some of the voices tell surreal stories or recount their bizarre dreams that seem only tangentially related to the crimes. They offer an outside or second view of some intense scenes and allow us to see the protagonists in a different light. The story hums and every angle that Solares illuminates makes Paracuan even more fascinating.

Cabrera and Rangel are both flawed detectives with true integrity. Rangel, a former rock musician, got into the force through is uncle. He makes the mistake of following the clues to the killings where they lead -- someone powerful. Cabrera, an overweight cop with few friends, makes a similar mistake in following the clues of the journalist's case a bit too far. Both men are willing to risk their lives to solve their cases even though they couldn't articulate why. They operate in the swamp of lies and betrayals where there isn't a single person that can be trusted. Their fellow policemen physically threaten and assault them when they dig up clues that contradict the official version of events. The palpable tension in the police headquarters when the cops are protecting their territory and ill gotten gains inevitably leads to violence.

In the end, I must admit I was a bit confused about how everything went down. Days later, I'm still thinking about some of those shifts of points of view and who knew what when. However, it just doesn't really matter much. The experience of reading Solares taut, tense and descriptive prose, translated by Aura Estrada and John Pluecker, is thrilling. I spent many happy hours in that morass of a Mexican town on the Gulf Coast.

What's Wrong with Citrus County?

There is something wrong with John Brandon's Citrus County. It isn't the writing. Brandon's prose flows beautifully. His descriptions of the muggy Florida Gulf Coast ooze into the reader's subconscious. It isn't the plot. This story of teenage attraction gone terribly awry makes your heart race faster than a first kiss. The dialogue drips with hidden meaning and the suspense builds with each scene. It isn't the characters. Toby, a 14-year old bad boy is compelling and creepy while his love interest, Shelby, is smart, tough and independent. Throw in their lost geography teacher, Mr Hibma, for comic relief and you've got a cast to rival an HBO series.

I think what's wrong with Citrus County is either John Brandon or me. We are led to believe, from the jacket copy, that this won't be a simple romance and that the hurdles Toby and Shelby face will be a bit higher than most young lovers. However, when Toby who seems to be just a bit worse than your typical truant, kidnaps Shelby's four-year old sister Kaley at the end of chapter one the book takes a terrifying turn. He performs the crime as a way of putting the aggressive Shelby in her place.

"She'd matched his stride on the way to lunch and wrapped her thin fingers around his arm and told him that if he came over and hung out and played a few games, then her dad would let them stay up and watch cable....She'd told Toby they might be able to take a walk and be alone.... Toby had felt angry, toyed with. Shelby had been so sure of herself. She'd walked right up to him. Nobody walked up to Toby."

Once Toby takes Kaley and locks her up in an old underground bunker he discovered in the moist Florida woods, my mind was constantly on the girl. Perhaps it is because I have a two-year old daughter. Interestingly, Kaley doesn't seem to be at the front of either Toby or Shelby's minds. Brandon continues to tell the story of their budding love interjected with their perspectives on Kaley.

Shelby has been through the routine before. Her mother died the previous year and her father moved Shelby and Kaley to Florida for a fresh start. She resents being treated with kid gloves in school and can't stand the church groups and other concerned adults that come calling. Toby, who lives with a negligent uncle who used to be abusive, discovers that the kidnapped girl is a burden. She's a roadblock to a better life. He begins to conceive of what life would be like with Shelby but how is that really possible when he's got her sister locked away in a bunker.

"He wanted a life where there was nothing between him and Shelby. He wanted to have that life without having to strand Kaley in the bunker. He was a kidnapper and might soon become something worse, but he was still a kid too. He could feel himself as a kid with a ripening heart who looked forward to things, who borrowed his schemes from the same old shelves as everyone else, who loved dumbly like people were meant to."

I couldn't focus on the love story at all. Every scene of budding young love left me exasperated. What about the little girl in the bunker? Each time Toby or Shelby tried to reach out to an adult and form a relationship, I thought about Kaley alone in the hole. It finally got so bad that I just had to glance at the end of the book, something that I never do, so I could actually go back and focus on the story Brandon was trying to tell.

I was never able to accept Toby as a sympathetic character or ever feel enough empathy for him, though Brandon tries to coax us into it. The crime he committed, even if he was a 14-year old, took me completely outside of the novel and into my own head.

The comic tone that Brandon had established in the first 35 pages was tattered for me. Yes, occasionally I did laugh at Mr Hibma's antics. He is an outrageously inept teacher who somehow finds a way to be successful girls basketball coach. But the scenes with Toby and Shelby were filled with so much pain and anguish that the comedy simply didn't ring true.

I freely admit that my reaction could have more to do with the two-year old sleeping safely in my house than it did with Brandon's story. Nonetheless, he buried the real story a bit too deeply, pun intended, and glossed over the true humanity of his tale. Brandon, through Toby, never allows Kaley to become a character and that bothered me. Believe me, kids that age and younger are individuals with their own personalities. Toby has had a tough life, but it is hard to see him as a kidnapper. How can he form a relationship with Shelby when he has to confront how he has ripped her family apart day after day? He's have to be a lot more damaged than this guy.

Despite these misgivings, I still recommend Citrus County. Brandon can write. I love lines like the one I quoted above, "borrowed his schemes from the same old shelves as everyone else." The sense of place in this novel is remarkably strong for contemporary America. How many places are as distinct as this humid backwoods county just north of Tampa Bay? I can promise that you've never read a coming of age story quite like this one.

The Physics of Imaginary Objects

Tina May Hall draws you into her bizarre collection of stories The Physics of Imaginary Objects, by leading off with the perfectly composed, traditional workshop tale Visitations. It's a glorious little story about a squirrel trapped in a kitchen wall and a pregnant woman's teetering relationship.

There are a few quirky lines and descriptions in Visitations -- "On the ultrasound, its spine had been a line of seeds, its fingers twigs finer than anything I could have cut." However nothing in it, including the language, the structure of the characters prepare us for the oddness that permeates the rest of the book.

Erratum: Insert "R" in "Transgressors" is a repetitive incantation based on statements from the American Microscopical Society in 1899 and 1900. Statements like "one man was missing, one dead." "I was engaged as a trained observer," are repeated through the piece. Somehow, Hall weaves this material into a satisfying story.

In Skinny Girls' Constitution and Bylaws she assembles the stories of 13 girls into a mythic fairytale. "Martine is 115 years old and still flat-chested. In her cold, blue heart, three little men live. By night, they write love poems and keep her awake with their sighing." To say Hall's descriptions are original would be to do her a grave disservice of understatement. Here are a few gems from Skinny Girls': "We fit six across the backseat and shiver together, arms and legs wrapped like eels around each other." "She is the corpse-bride running after the soccer ball." "She is pretty as a stream, kind as a blizzard, graceful as a schooner a thousand feet under water."

Story after story veer in unpredictable directions. She gives us a cycle of sonnets, instructions for contacting the dead and a tale about a growing sinkhole that swallows up a newscaster. Finally, she presents a fully formed masterpiece -- the novella All the Day's Sad Stories.

Orginally published as a chapbook by Caketrain, this tale of a relationship struggling under the burden of infertility is told in pithy, poetic single-page chunks. Each page, individually titled, can stand alone although most of them gain power in proximity to the others. Mercy and Jake are a couple navigating modern life with it's vague threats and empty promises. Those threats eventually become real when chalk marked Xs begin appearing on their house.

Physics of Imaginary Objects is a book that takes constant risks. Hall seems to always being on the edge of absurdity or perhaps even self indulgence and yet in the end she leaves the reader with a sense of awe and wonder. By the time I was 20 pages in, I trusted her completely and was eager to go in whatever direction she wanted to take me.

The pleasure of reading Hall wasn't just intellectual or emotional it was also visceral. The University of Pittsburgh did a sterling job with the hardback. It's a small book like Algonquin used to put out. It fits perfectly in your hand. The cover image somehow conveys the folktale-like weirdness contained within. The page numbers are only on the right hand side and denoted with a slash. You'll see 20/21 or 104/105. I can't explain why I love that but I do.