Cranky

I will not be blogging about Copper Elephant this week as my saved copy of Room showed up in the library.

Many bloggers and book reviewers have been in a kerfluffle about Emma Donoghue's Room.  It seems that this book is universally loved -- and yet I felt the same way in the first half of this book as I did when reading V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic, except that then I was 14 and even that voyeuristic horror-thrill was not particularly satisfying.  So here are my three reasons why Room is not a great book, although a perfectly engaging read (thereby giving it the airplane reading score of a 7 [although that could be a 6.8 if you have a long flight -- this is good for the Charleston-LaGuardia route -- but it won't last for that flight to the West Coast]):

1)  Reviewers seems to love the voice of the 5 year old narrator -- and there is something intriguing about seeing his world (and then our world) through his eyes.  But that voice can be frustrating and limiting -- particularly by the end when you really would like to know more about what his mother is thinking and not simply what she is willing to say to her son.  This is the reason why the word "gimmick" seems to appear in almost every review.

2) The voyeurism -- I would like not to read a book that taps into that part of my brain/psyche that reads People magazine stories about Elizabeth Smart.  The book itself was written in the aftermath of a case about a woman who was held captive by her father for 24 years.  So there is voyeurism at all ends -- the book was created out of a voyeuristic interest in one woman's horrific life experiences and then the book attract readers who want to read about such horrific experiences.  But we get that horror through the eyes and brain of a five year old for whom Room is normal -- a voice where Outside is nothing but space and TV is wholly imaginary and Wardrobe is a safe place to sleep when Old Nick comes to call late at night.  While I kept reading I hated this horror/normal reality that the book was presenting.

3) And then there are the "mother's love" responses.  I reject out of hand any use of rape/torture/confinement as setting up conditions for an argument about the endless depths of mother love.  Let us be clear that rape/torute/confinement are exactly as they sound.  Let us not rationalize them with any claim about what a great mother Ma is -- it is not about whether or not she is a great mother -- because what she is is confined, raped, tortured.  We learn nothing about motherhood from this book because we should not learn anything about motherhood from this book.  Can people parent under conditions of extreme deprivation? Absolutely.  Do we hold such people in high esteem?  Absolutely.  Do we seek to learn from their experiences?  We do not.  First of all it would be the height of absurdity to make any claim about what you can learn when you are not in such an experience of extreme degradation.  But more importantly it would be morally wrong for any of us to say: see what a great job Ma did even while being raped and confined! as some sort of message to other women experiencing abuse in their domestic lives.   I would say (controversially) that Ma is absent any obligations to her son because of her confinement and continued rape.  Is it better for Jack that she cares for him as she does?  Yes.  But is she required morally to have done so?  No.

Martyrdom is not a model of motherhood.

So should you read Room?  Well you will get to join in on all the discussions, but if you also thought that The Lovely Bones was a manipulative book that made you want to take a very long shower, then I would not bother.