Bringing Back Baldwin, and Life in a Room [Book Reviews]

Reading this collection during a particularly fraught midterm election season, one could be forgiven for thinking Baldwin was more than a little prescient when he said in a 1963 speech that "if we don't now do everything in our power to change this country," America could become, "a country which is so tangled and so trapped and so immobilized by its interior dissension that it can't do anything else." This feeling of timeliness carries on throughout many of the pieces. Save for a few date-revealing-details, Baldwin could just as easily be describing the climate of today. The topics which he addressed decades ago have remained at the front of the American consciousness, and with good reason. There have not been (and will not be) any easy answers. While one hopes that Baldwin would be pleased with the progress that has been made, there is also the sense that he would not be surprised by what has not been done.

James Campbell, writing in The New York Times, criticized the volume as having a "lazy presentation," due in part to Kenan's spare approach to annotation and endnotes. As Campbell is the author of the Baldwin biography Talking at the Gates as well as the editor who commissioned the essay which provides the title for this book, we will defer to him as the expert. But in the end, the omissions and oversights that bother Campbell may only matter to the most thorough of Baldwin scholars. They certainly do not temper the tremendous power, even nearly twenty-five years after his death, of Baldwin's prose. The rest of us can just be happy to have these difficult-to-locate works collected in one place. In that regard, Kenan has done us all a great service.

In a short piece on language, entitled "Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare," Baldwin writes that in addition to hating the Bard, he "feared him too, feared him because in his hands, the English language became the mightiest of instruments. No one would ever write that way again. No one would ever be able to match, much less surpass, him." The same can be said of James Baldwin. In his hands, too, words were both instrument and weapon, used in equal measure to seduce and entertain and to cut down. - Sara Crump

Image from Hachette Books

Imagine you're sick. Maybe you have the flu or even just a bad cold. You can't go to work, and you've watched so many episodes of Law & Order that you're humming the theme song in your sleep and dreaming of Jack McCoy and Lennie Briscoe. Time off was nice at first, but you need to get out and back to real life. You've got cabin fever. Now try and imagine that no matter how much you wanted to leave your room, you couldn't.

This is the situation in which we find Jack and Ma, the two main characters in Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue's excellent new novel, Room. Only Jack doesn't know yet that he's got it so bad. To him, the twelve-by-twelve garden shed where he lives with his mother is the entire world, filled with friendly objects such as Bed, Wardrobe, and Meltedy Spoon. The reader discovers quickly that Ma has been held captive in the shed for several years by a man known only as Old Nick and that Jack has been there his whole life. Room opens on Jack's fifth birthday.

Rather than forcing the reader to feel Ma's claustrophobic life firsthand, Donoghue softens the view by employing Jack as the narrator. This was an inspired choice, as the story becomes less lurid seen through the eyes of the young storyteller. The voice that Donoghue has chosen for Jack is believably that of a five-year-old whose only interaction has been with his mother and friends like Dora and SpongeBob, friends who live in the planets he views once TV is turned on.

In many ways, Jack and Ma are a normal mother and son, despite their horrendously abnormal circumstances - they goof around singing Kylie Minogue songs, Ma gets short-tempered when Jack asks her to read Dylan the Digger for the millionth time, and Jack has important questions like "Why do rappers wear shades even in the night...are their eyeballs sore?" While Ma's own world has become almost unbearably small, through a mother's special magic, she is able to keep Jack's world large and open. She has even made a game of the weekly screams for help they make while Old Nick is out. Jack gives Ma a purpose. He is her will to live.

Jack's very concept of reality is challenged when Ma has to explain the Outside to him in anticipation of an attempt at freedom. With the tension mounting and the stakes raised, readers, along with Ma, have to put faith in a boy who has never known life beyond the four walls of Room. From there, things only get more complex, and Donoghue handles all of the developments expertly. While the book is superb even if the reader has been let in on what happens, we'll let you find out for yourself.

Before Room had even been published, there was some uproar in the press over reports and assumptions that Donoghue had based her fiction on the all-too-true story of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian man who for tweinty-four years kept his daughter Elisabeth imprisoned and fathered several children with her. Critical accusations were made that the author was capitalizing on the sordid story. Donoghue has made clear, however, that while she was "triggered" by the story, it was merely a jumping-off point for her own work.

In any case, what Donoghue has created here is a wholly original work of great power. Room and its young narrator will stay with you long after you have turned the last page. - Sara Crump

Room was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is available at BookPeople.