ROOM by Emma Donoghue (2010)

"Scared is what you're feeling. Brave is what you're doing." - Emma Donoghue, Room

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Disclaimer: This review is constructed upon my personal reaction to the book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

You know how I love The Martian? You know how I never shut up about The Martian? Well, I have good news: I’ve found another book that I love as much as The Martian. (That's right: another book I won't shut up about! Joy!) That book is Room by Emma Donoghue, and by another text, I don’t think I’ve ever been as thoroughly moved. I wasn’t even going to review this book, but as of writing, it’s been a week since I finished reading and I still can’t stop thinking about it, which I think might be the universe trying to tell me something. The novel is the story of five-year-old Jack and his Ma. Jack and Ma live in Room, an eleven-foot-square garden shed which, to Jack, is the whole world, but to Ma? Not quite. Ma knows the truth: seven years ago, she was kidnapped, snatched off the street and held captive in Room ever since. (I’ll let you figure out on your own who Jack’s father is.) I’m not going to pretend this was an easy book to read. On the contrary, it was painfully harrowing; often I had to stop reading mid-sentence and momentarily step away, simply overwhelmed by the two-piece family’s sickening reality. Sometimes, I felt physically ill. Other times, I felt empty, as if this book was draining the life out of me. It was an emotional rollercoaster, to say the least; definitely not one for the faint-hearted, yet still gorgeously touching, a stunning work of powerful art. Heart-breaking and breath-taking, Room was, for me, a wonder to behold. 

There are so many things I liked about this book, but my favourite thing about Room was how Jack didn’t understand what was going on. The narrative style was a daring choice on Donoghue’s behalf; rather than utilising the more sophisticated voice of Ma, who could have provided a darker, more affecting point of view, Donoghue chose Jack to be the narrator, using his limited perspective of the world and his unwitting innocence in stark contrast with the context to create that darker, more affecting POV through imagery, rather than taking the easy way out -- and it worked, astonishingly well. It was so sad to see Jack not get it. It was genuinely distressing to be reading and to yourself know what was going on, yet to have the very person telling you the story fail to grasp his reality, simply because he was too young to understand. That, in its way, made Room surprisingly disturbing. Donoghue’s use of a child’s voice and a child’s tunnel vision created this disturbing atmosphere, as we had to piece together the story through what Jack was seeing and understanding with his blunt, yet stunted comprehension of the real world -- and when it hit us that what Jack was describing was more than what it seemed, it hit us hard, as seeing a child’s innocence be mutilated always does. 

Jack’s innocence often made him disagreeable, too. Ma, obviously, understands that Room is not the whole world; she and Jack are prisoners stolen from the world, unjustly robbed of normal lives. But Jack is born in Room, and Ma realises that there is no point in teaching her son about the real world when she can’t prove to him that it actually exists. Why disillusion him with what he can’t have? Of course, once Jack starts asking questions and Ma is forced to tell him the ugly truth, said truth is extremely difficult for him to comprehend, as it should be -- he's just a kid, after all, and grossly adult things like kidnapping and captivity aren't things he should have to grapple with at his age. Yet Jack's failure to understand leads to a saddening lack of empathy. The poor kid doesn't really want to leave Room; outside is big and scary and full of People and Places and Things, three things he has literally never had to deal with. Ma, obviously, feels the exact opposite: while to Jack, Room is the perfect size, to Ma it has always been cramped, stifling, suffocating, the walls bearing down on her more and more with every passing day. She can see her life trickling down the drain as she wastes away in this tiny box, and she wants out because she knows there is an Out. Jack only knows In. Ma has a home outside of Room, but to Jack, Room is home, and he's perfectly happy there, thank you very much. Mother and son can't see eye to eye -- Jack because he's too little, Ma because she's too miserable -- and this creates friction, Ma often finding herself frustrated with Jack's lack of interest in escaping Room. Their  worldviews -- and by that I mean their literal view of the world -- differ so strongly and so vastly, a factor Donoghue lost no time in taking advantage of; Jack's stubborn nature was natural and convincing, a perfect representation of a child responding to trauma they don't even know they're undergoing, but it wasn't Jack's obstinacy that I loved so much in the book; it was because despite his stubbornness, despite what he knew and despite what he may have wanted, Jack tried his best to help Ma escape Room anyway, because that was what she so desperately desired. 

That, for me, was what Room was all about: sacrifice. Room is a book about a tiny, tight-knit family surviving on the bones of their asses; it's about a little boy running against everything he believes because his mother asked it of him. The tagline for Room is "Love knows no boundaries", and it's in Jack's sacrifice that we see it come true. Room is all Jack knows. It's where he was born, where he has grown up, where his entire world is contained -- but he is willing to remove himself from the literal boundaries of Room's walls and throw himself into the real world if it means Ma will be happy, if it means Ma will come back to him. This is where I found the ultimate poignancy and power in Donoghue's stunning novel. This book is a story about family. It’s about hardship, and suffering, and making the most out of an awful situation. It’s about learning, and not just learning, but education, too, and I assure you that there’s a difference in this book. It’s about living and growing and understanding each other, or at the very least, trying to; trying to empathise, trying to Get It, trying to do everything you can for the people you love even when you don’t Get It at all. With the force of a freight train, Room struck me and bloodied me and left me begging for mercy, but it also left me brighter-eyed, and not just because I was moved almost to tears. As author Audrey Niffenegger put it, when I finished reading Room, I looked up and found that the world looked the same, but I was somehow different. Maybe the world looked more beautiful than I remembered -- or maybe Room has taught me never to take that world for granted. God knows I’m lucky enough to be able to look out at it at all.

What the hell is water?: A reflection on the capacity of choice

Disclaimer: The following is a response to Kenyon Commencement Speech by David Foster Wallace. It is constructed upon my own personal reaction to the address. All thoughts and opinions are my own. 

Blink. Breathe. Think.

You are now conscious of the things you take most for granted; you are now conscious of the habits you usually do not pay attention to. You are blinking. You are breathing.

You are thinking.

Being selfish, I’ve noticed, is one of the most inherently human things you can be, yet as a society, we ridicule and slander and shame selfishness because in a world of seven billion beating hearts, to only care about one is deemed vile, repulsive, a trait from which you can never recover. What we fail to realise is that you really can’t recover from selfishness, because there is nothing more natural than it. Think about it: your own interests are your primary concern because they’re right there all the time. They’re immediate; the interests of others are not. The interests of others have to be communicated to you, brought to your attention, so it’s easy to just forget about and ignore them. There’s not a lot we can do about this. It’s our natural, default setting.

But it doesn’t have to be.

When my Year 12 English teacher handed me a copy of David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement Speech and told me to give it a go, I had no idea I was about to read the piece of writing that would fundamentally change the very essence of the person I was. An address at Kenyon College in 2005, the Kenyon Commencement Speech (adapted into a book, This Is Water, in 2009) discusses a myriad of ubiquitous and important truths of human nature, but the one I want to reflect on here -- the one that struck a chord with me so pure that I still feel it reverberating somewhere in my chest -- is the fact that we have a choice: to live, or to live consciously. To only live is to succumb to our natural, default setting. That’s fine. A lot of people choose only to live -- although given that it is our natural, default setting, one can hardly call it a choice. To live consciously, then, is to escape our hard-wiring. It is to overcome the passivity of our unconscious consumption of the world; it is, as Wallace puts it, to acknowledge that it can actually be “within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars”. By living consciously, you are choosing when and where to extract meaning and significance from the mundane. You are choosing what to see. You are choosing what to value.

You are choosing what to think.

Yes: being selfish is one of the most inherently human things you can be. It’s completely normal to look at a situation and see only how it affects you, bothers you, changes you. To quote Wallace, “everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe, the realest, most important person in existence”. Living consciously means looking at the same situation and choosing to realise that you are not the only person in it. I’ll give you some some examples. Let’s say you, like me, are an impatient driver, and one day you’re late for work and your knuckles are turning white as they grip the steering wheel and you’re grinding your teeth in frustration because the idiot in front of you is doing 30 in a 50km zone and if you’re late to work because this moron doesn’t seem to know what a speed limit is then with God as your witness, you swear, you’ll rear-end him just to teach him a lesson. You could choose to look at this situation and see only the cause of your own inconvenience. I mean, 30 in a 50km zone? Seriously? You could, however, choose to step back and look at the moment differently. Why is the car in front driving so slowly? (And I promise you, it’s not because he has a personal vendetta against you specifically, even though it probably feels like he does.) Sure, maybe he’s just an asshole. Maybe, however, he has something fragile perched precariously on the back seat and he’s driving glacially slow so as not to break it. Maybe his kid is lying across the back seat, but his kid has just broken their leg and he’s rushing them to the hospital as fast as he dares, not wanting to jolt the poor kid’s broken leg. Maybe this guy just has anxiety so bad that he’d rather not leave the house at all, but he has to go to work because how’s he going to pay the rent without working, so 30km/h is the fastest he can will himself to drive. Maybe he’s recovering from neurotic agoraphobia. Who knows? You don’t. Here’s another example: I had a bad experience at work once, when a woman, whose patience I dared test by asking her to wait for me to finish what I was doing, verbally abused me, attacking my competence and adequacy because I lacked the capacity to be in two places at once. As a customer service worker, it’s not uncommon for me to be ruthlessly degraded when I make the smallest of mistakes. People tend to treat customer service workers…. poorly, to say the least, because you never spend enough time around them to develop the realisation that actually, they’re a human being, just like you! Having read the Kenyon Commencement Speech, I’ve since been acutely aware of how a person’s indifference to or ignorance of conscious living affects my day-to-day life. For a long time, I considered myself a victim of the general public because they fail to be conscious of other people's’ lives. Only now does it occur to me that I’m also guilty of doing the exact same thing. That woman who yelled at me on the drive-thru; is she always that mean, or had she just had a bad day? Was she in a hurry to be somewhere? Maybe she was just a stupid cow -- or maybe she was picking up lunch for her son, whose chemotherapy session was beginning in half an hour. None of these scenarios, picked from a crop of a million possibilities, are likely, but none of them are impossible, either. You just have to choose to consider them.

Of course, we always have “freedom of choice regarding what to think about”, and with this freedom, you could choose to ignore the endless explanations, give in to your default setting, consume the world as if your “immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities”. Wallace and I, however, implore you not to choose this. I’ve come to believe, since reading the Kenyon Commencement Speech, that humans are made out of moments. Now, I was a chemistry student in high school, so I do know the science: our bodies and hearts and minds are made up of atoms and ions and stardust, but I think our souls -- for I do rather believe in that namby-pamby nonsense -- are composed of moments, tiny snapshots captured at random, seemingly insignificant seconds, and that these shape who we really are. I have also come to believe that these moments can only have meaning if we choose to construct that meaning ourselves. This is the second time I’ve reviewed and reflected on David Foster Wallace’s words, because two years after reading them, I still think about those words nearly every day. They changed me. They taught me the most important lesson I have ever learned: we must escape self-centeredness, we must break free from the human condition of selfishness and solipsism, and we must learn to consider and be conscious of other people’s lives having the same importance as our own, even though it’s hard, even though it’s easier to just forget that other human beings exist in the same cognitive capacity as you. If we don’t utilise our power to choose, we are choosing not to think. So think. Blink, breathe, think.

And make your choice.