Room

by Emma Donoghue

[teachergorman]

This is an unconventional form of a review, but Room is an unconventional novel, and my hope is that this will reach Ms. Donoghue’s attention someday, hopefully on a bad day when she needs a pick-me-up.

Dear Ms. Donoghue,
I just finished reading Room, and it made me want to tell you a story. Once upon a time, when I was a sophomore in college, one of my creative writing profs, Vic Bobb, a talented author and innately gifted storyteller, recommended Nabokov's Lolita. He warned me that, when I finished it, I would feel a kind of despair specific to writers. “You’ll realize you’ll never write anything that good.” When I finished it, I was old enough to know I didn’t have the ability to write a book that good at the time, but I was still young and arrogant enough to believe I could one day.

That was twenty years ago. I’ve retained some of that ambition. Maybe twenty years from now I will accept my limitations, but I’m still foolhardy enough to believe my next novel will be better than my last. In fact, I think the one I’m working on now will be pretty damned good. But I’ve read other novels like Lolita where I closed the back cover and understood the kind of despair Bobb was talking about.

When I finished Room, the first thing I did was laugh out loud, a strange, barking, triumphant laugh, while my eyes filled with tears. I was still in the story at that moment, not reflecting upon it, and in that space I could feel I’d experienced a great artistic victory. And then I was immediately reminded of Vic Bobb’s warning about Lolita. I will never write anything as good as Room. I know you don’t know who I am, so this must seem like a low bar, but please know that your hard work earns this kind of response from lesser writers engaged in your craft. I don’t begrudge you that for an instant; I’m grateful you have elevated the form.

Next year, I will teach Room to 17 and 18 year-olds in my creative writing classes. I expect some of them will have the same response to Room that I did to Lolita. “Maybe someday,” they’ll think. And it’s possible one of them will be correct; maybe one day a student of mine will write a book that rises to the level of Room. I hope so. And I thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you,

Benjamin Gorman