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.