Child’s Play

If every aspiring author could be forced to heed only one piece of advice, it should be this: No matter how clever you believe your gimmick is, do not write your novel from the point of view of a dog. The second most important rule should be that you should never write a novel from the point of view of a child. Only one child’s-eye view novel for adults—Nicholson Baker’s The Everlasting Story of Nory—has managed to turn a child’s internal voice into artful narration. And even then, a reader can only manage to choke down a few pages of the book at a time before needing to take a rest from the precociousness. (As in a fantasy sequence where Nory sees an exterminator at work and imagines meeting the imperiled bugs: “‘We’re Death Watch Beetles,’ said one of them. ‘A bad man is squirting our country full of terrible poison.'”)

Emma Donoghue’s Room, then, is that hoariest of clichés, the exception that proves the rule. Room is a thriller told from the point of view of a child named Jack. Here are the opening sentences:

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.

The whole thing is told like that, as though it was warbled from the throat of a young boy with a short attention span. Jack is proof that a child should not be the first-person narrator of a novel: His realistically childlike digressions and fanciful metaphors—when he pulls a hoodie over his head, the zipper “chews” his face—make for a horrible narrator. The reader can barely tell what’s going on at first, and Jack’s self-obsession makes it hard for us to get a clear view of the other characters or setting. Remarkably, Donoghue uses these faults to her advantage.

The hook is that this one room is the only world Jack has ever known (which explains the capitalization of “Wardrobe” and “Bed” in the book’s opening—those items, along with Toilet, Bath, and Skylight, have developed a Platonic idealization for Jack, and so they are proper nouns), and he has only ever interacted with his mother, who hides him in Wardrobe from a nightly visitor named Old Nick. From Jack’s stilted, ignorant perspective, the reader is forced to peer around and behind the words to figure out what is going on.

As a sick realization of the truth dawns on the reader, you’re forced to try to interpret the events, translating them from child-speak to adult comprehension. It’s a clever, Hitchcock-style constraint for a creepy thriller. Donoghue keeps the reader invested in turning the pages as fast as humanly possible. About halfway through, there’s a change that makes Jack’s narration slightly more unbelievable, but the first half of the book is so compelling that sheer inertia will send readers headlong into the end. The remarkable thing about Room is how satisfying it is to read it in one marathon sitting; it breaks a cardinal storytelling rule and twists that transgression to its own advantage.