A Captive’s View of Life, and He’s 5
by Janet Maslin - The New York Times , September 12, 2010

ROOM

By Emma Donoghue
321 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $24.99.

(Pan Macmillan in UK)

 The narrator of Emma Donoghue’s “Room” is a 5-year-old boy who leads a busy life. “We have thousands of things to do every morning,” Jack tells the reader, and he seems to mean it. Jack is a smart, eager kid with a great imagination and unlimited energy. But he and his mother have been trapped in the 11-by-11-foot room of the title since the day he was born.

Ms. Donoghue, whose novel is on the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker prize, chooses to be locked into a tight space herself. She has set herself the challenge of writing all of “Room” in Jack’s voice and envisioning only what he can see. And Jack divides the world into two distinct realms. There is Room, as Jack calls it, because he loves the way a proper noun can turn even Plant or Rug into a character. And there’s whatever may lurk outside of Room. Anything that’s not in Room is truly in Outer Space.

Room is a place of such warmth, fun, intimacy and soothing routine that Jack is content there. For his 26-year-old Ma, it’s a very different story. Seven years earlier she was on her way to her college’s library when she met a bad man who stole her; that, at least, is the way she describes the kidnapping to her son. Jack and Ma refer to the bad man as Old Nick. He is also Jack’s father, but they don’t talk about that.

Old Nick has never gotten a good look at Jack or even really wanted one. What he wants is to visit Ma in Room, the soundproofed, lead-lined backyard shed where he has imprisoned her. Jack (who hides in a wardrobe at such moments) times the man’s visits by counting creaks of the bedsprings. And Ma accommodates her rapist in exchange for the supplies she needs to keep Jack alive.

“We’re like people in a book, and he won’t let anybody else read it,” Ma says of their plight. Coincidentally they are not the only people in recent books about women trapped in close, sustained relationships with their captors, even to the point of bearing children. Chevy Stevens’s “Still Missing” and Laura Lippman’s “I’d Know You Anywhere” offer more mainstream, victim-narrated versions of this story.
Maslin's full review at NYT.