Room v. Bad Marie
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OPENING ROUND
Room
v. Bad Marie
Judged by Jennifer Weiner
Jennifer Weiner is the author of eight books, including Good in Bed, In Her Shoes, Best Friends Forever, and Fly Away Home. She is a graduate of Princeton University and lives in Philadelphia with her family. She can be found on Twitter. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I wrote about Room and did an email Q and A on my blog with Emma Donoghue this fall, with a giveaway of my books to readers who bought it that week. I haven’t met any of the other authors.”
So here we go: two books about mothers, or a mother stand-in, and young children. Two stories about kids in peril, two novels with a microscopic focus on the details that make up a preschooler’s life: mac-and-cheese lunches and naptime rituals, insipid kiddie books about anthropomorphized construction machinery, and how to tell if you’ve breast-fed for too long. Seriously, Morning News, I don’t have enough of this in my real life?
By now, everyone knows what Emma Donoghue’s Room is all about. Which is unfortunate: I would give just about anything to not have read the reviews, to have dipped into those first pages not knowing (SPOILER ALERT) that the idyllic closeness that five-year-old Jack describes during a day-in-the-life with his funny, resourceful, creative Ma—the beloved routines, the exercise and the craft projects, the memory games and the sing-a-longs and the snake made out of eggshells and the way she’s never more than a few feet away—is the result not of Ma having recently read The Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother, but of an unspeakable crime: Ma and Jack are imprisoned in the 11-by-11-foot room of the title. Ma has been there for years. Jack is the child of her rapist.
The first ominous hint that Room isn’t the paradise Jack imagines comes when Jack, blithely describing his day, gets to the part where Ma stands beneath the skylight holding a lamp “and everything bright, then snap and dark again. Light again, she makes it last three seconds then dark, then light for just a second….She does this in the night. I think it helps her get to sleep again.”
I heard the premise of Room and thought, “no thanks.” As the mother of young children, I could barely read the coverage of the Josef Fritzl case without wanting to cry. Why on earth would I want to spend time with a piece of fiction that callously appropriates one of the worst things any mother could imagine?
But Room grabbed me from its very first pages, and soon I was entranced and impressed with the way Ma manages to fill their days with fun and improving activities, and how Jack sees the world, in which each bit of Room is a friend with its own name (“I get on Rocker to take a pin from Kit on Shelf, minus one means now there’ll be zero left of the five.”)
Jack is a delight, a precocious, observant little boy who emerges as one of the narrators that great fiction gives us too rarely, with a one-of-a-kind view of the world and a vivid, expressive language all his own.
Here is Jack, rolled in a rug, playing dead, contemplating his escape: “Something pressing on me, that must be Ma’s hand. She needs me to be Super Prince JackerJack, so I stay extra still. No more moving. I’m Corpse, I’m the Count, no, I’m his friend even deader, I’m all stiff like a broken robot with a power cut.”
“Do real five-year-olds talk like this?,” a few critics quibbled. To which I’d say, “Really, does anyone want to spend an entire book hearing the voice of an honest-to-God five year old?” Because I can assure you, it’s a lot of fart-and-booger jokes, short on refreshing observations and brilliant turns of phrase and long on the “Can we watch SpongeBob now?”
Donoghue shines in her thoughtful consideration of what happens, emotionally and physically, to a mother and son in such close quarters, and what happens when they escape them. Jack, never having encountered stairs, is forced to bump between floors on his bottom; his skin, having never been exposed to sunlight, burns painfully in spite of layers of clothing, sunglasses, and sunscreen.
Room isn’t a perfect book. Like many non-American writers who set their books in the States, Donoghue doesn’t always get the slang quite right. Some of Ma’s expressions (“safe as houses,” “the spit of me,” ) seem more British than American, as do the curried chickpeas her captor brings for lunch.
The book’s second half, once Jack and Ma’s world opens up, doesn’t quite measure up to the potent force of their time in captivity, and once Room’s doors are opened, some of Ma’s actions seem inconsistent with the smart, resourceful woman we’ve come to know.
Still, the book is, to resort to a cliché, unputdown-able, and it raises fascinating questions: What is a mother’s obligation to her child? How much of her independence must a mother sacrifice for a son, or a daughter’s, well-being? How do you survive hardship? How do you survive joy? I agree with all the critics who put it on their year-end best-of lists, and think that Room is a book that will endure for many years to come.
If Room’s narrator is instantly lovable, Marcy Dermansky’s Bad Marie is the opposite. This book comes out swinging, looking for trouble, breaking the rules.
It’s devoutly in the school of tell, don’t show—and one of the things it tells you, over and over, is that the heroine has a really great rack. Its heroine, the possessor of said rack, is defiantly dislikable, just out of jail and swilling whiskey on the job. By the book’s third page she’s drunk and naked in the tub with the two-year-old she’s paid to care for, displaying herself for her employer’s husband’s delectation.
A few pages later, with young Caitlin napping the way children often do in fiction and hardly ever do when you need them to in real life, the husband takes her up on the implicit offer:
“The babysitter,” Benoit said.
“The husband.”
They understood each other, the situation.
Language like this reminds you that you are The Reader, midway through The Novel, a fact you are never encouraged nor, really, permitted, to forget.
In the wake of the hookup, Marie, Benoit, and Caitlin jet off to Paris. Benoit reconnects with an old love turned film star, and Marie discovers the burdens of full-time custody in a place where she doesn’t speak the language. She ditches Benoit, hops a train to Nice, and encounters yet another movie star (this one’s American, “a young man wearing ripped jeans and aviator sunglasses, reading Ulysses.”) Eventually, Marie and Caitlin end up in Mexico, home land of Marie’s lost love, where her time-sweetened memories give way to painful reality.
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Bad Marie reads like it was written with autotune set to “Mary Gaitskill.” (And I mean this as a description, not an insult.) Many of Gaitskill’s trademarks are there, from the flattened language to the unlikable protagonist to the sinister underpinnings of sex and menace. It’s a world where grownups are savages, and children, even worse. (“Caitlin grinned. Caitlin was happy when she got her way. She seemed to get her way most of the time.”). The men are duplicitous and weak, other women are competition, the sex has more to do with power than affection, and everyone behaves badly.
The story is plagued by improbable coincidences: The author of Marie’s all-time favorite book—the one she found in the prison library which, bien sûr, stocks French fiction in translation—is married to her childhood frenemy, a cardboard-thin workaholic named Ellen. That Ellen and Benoit have no reason to share as much as a cup of coffee, let alone a life, is something even Marie is forced to acknowledge. Wealthy movie stars, flush with cash and with spare bedrooms at the ready, appear at the precise moment the plot requires them. At times, the book is as unpleasant as a literary version of Jackass, as when Marie and her entourage encounter a toothless, scabby, starving cat named Ludivine: “Mucus was dripping out of both of the cat’s eyes. It went straight for Benoit, pressed itself against his legs and started to meow, the loudest meow Marie had ever heard a cat make. Marie had to suppress the urge to kick it.”
Sometimes, reading can be as voluptuous and embracing as slipping into a warm bath. Reading Bad Marie is more like picking up a penknife and stabbing yourself repeatedly in the thigh. It’s not what you’d call a good time.
And yet. And yet. Caitlin and Marie somehow break the bonds of two dimensions, and authorial intervention, and emerge as engaging characters. The bond between caretaker and child deepens as the story trips across the globe, the screws of terror ratcheting ever tighter. Will Marie commit the ultimate female transgression? Will Caitlin survive Marie? Will Marie survive herself?
In spite of everything—the flat-as-a-crepe prose, the horrible dying cat, the insistent display of the author’s bag of tricks—I raced through the last 30 pages, desperate to find out the answers.
Room has gotten plenty of attention this year. It was reviewed twice by the Times and made that paper’s year-end best-of list, along with a slew of others, but the author remained curiously unprofiled and uncelebrated. I couldn’t tell you, for example, what color dress New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman wore to the tea party Donoghue’s publisher held to celebrate her book’s publication, because if there was such a party, the Times wasn’t there to breathlessly recount its details. There were no news items about the build-up to the book’s publication, no adoring profiles, no stories analyzing the news stories and adoring profiles, no magazine cover story proclaiming her a Great American Author (of course not! She’s British, now living in Canada!) [actually, she’s Irish —ed.], no invitation to sit on a talk-show host’s couch and talk about how she came to create such a brilliant book
As for Bad Marie, published as a paperback original, few papers bothered reviewing it at all, although the Times was kind enough to include it in a round-up of books about nannies.
What made these books—or, at least, their authors—so hard for the critics to embrace? Why didn’t they get the attention that translates into sales? Why so much love for Franzen and Shteyngart and hardly any ink for Emma Donoghue and Marcy Dermansky?
I blame the children.
After all, writing about unhappiness in the suburbs places you in the tradition of Great American Novelists from Updike to Cheever to Roth. Creating dystopian fiction locates you in the land of Orwell and Huxley. But there’s not much in the canon about the day-to-day details of the lives of mothers and young children. And whose tradition are you in when you’re writing about mothers, children, and the monsters who imprison and torture them? Stephen King? John Fowles? V.C. Andrews?
One imagines the questions when such books land on the editor’s desk: Does this book involve preschool children? Was it written by Tom Perrotta? Is the author a woman? Does she have little kids herself? Does this bear any resemblance to a mommyblog? Does the author have a mommyblog? Does this manuscript smell, faintly, of the diaper pail? Can’t I just write about Charles Bock some more?
When women write literary fiction about little children, fiction that includes the quotidian details of childcare—the snack preparation, the sunscreen application, the way a poorly-packed diaper bag can turn any day into a disaster—they have to work harder than Ginger Rogers, dancing backward in heels, to show that they’re writing Serious Literature in spite of what’s perceived as unserious subject matter.
So: Room wins the round, Bad Marie is worth a read. Now that that uncomfortable bit of hierarchical, phallocentric, dichotomous business is out of the way, let me add that my hope for Room is that its excellence will prompt critics to look at their own biases and make room for more, and varied subjects, and more, and varied kinds of writers, when they start deciding who’s worthy of their attention.
Advancing:
Room
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
Kevin: Rarely in the Tournament of Books have I read an analysis of two books that so closely mirrors my own opinions. It was actually a little startling to read. I almost don’t know what to write without repeating what Judge Weiner just said, and I don’t think I could say it with more zip.
I know you and I differed slightly on these books. I liked Room a little better than you did and you liked Bad Marie a little better than I did. The first maybe I can attribute to the fact that I have two boys, one just a little younger and one just a little older than Jack is in the novel. I read the book in two sittings and probably cried six times. I should point out that I also cry during Hoosiers as well as Buffy reruns on Logo, but I was seriously moved by Room, and I rarely felt manipulated. Their escape from captivity was about as harrowing as anything you’d get in an action thriller, although every scene after that, while often interesting because of your intense investment in the characters, is anticlimax. Everything happens a little too easily. The bad guy is captured quickly and we’re assured he’s going to jail forever. The hospital staff is really nice. There are some minor family issues, but after their intense, years-long ordeal, they have a relatively soft landing in the real world.
Donoghue stops being cruel to her darlings and the stakes are dramatically reduced. The one time either of them seems to be in any peril it is resolved very quickly and without an afterthought. Nevertheless when I turned the last page, all was forgiven. I really liked this book a lot.
I’ve always said that critics of literary fiction make way too much of coincidence in novels. It is to the point sometimes that I think some young fiction writers have become so allergic to coincidence that nothing surprising ever happens in their novels at all. In real life, though, “that was an unbelievable coincidence” is nearly synonymous with “I have a great story to tell you.” For Shakespeare and Dickens and Austen the unlikely coincidence was practically their canvas.
The two coincidences that start Bad Marie are almost crippling to the novel, however. The first, as Judge Weiner describes, is that Marie seeks out her old childhood friend in New York, with whom she has had no contact for years, and discovers that she happens to be wed to the author of her favorite obscure French novel. Then when Marie and said author run away to Paris with Caitlyn, they happened to be seated next to not just a movie actress, but one with whom the obscure French author had a sexual relationship years ago, and who has been pining for him ever since. It’s all so flimsy you can feel the author’s hand on every page. At one point in the story, Marie boards a train and thinks to herself that she half expects her lover and the movie actress to be on the train and the reader is thinking, “Me too, because only about five people exist in the world of this book!”
As Judge Weiner says, though, the book is rescued by the finely drawn relationship between Caitlyn and Marie, which is genuinely touching.
John: Everyone is on target here. Jennifer Weiner has written one of the best judging commentaries in the history of the tournament. And I can’t really dispute what you have to say about the coincidences at the heart of Bad Marie. But here’s the thing: I don’t care. I couldn’t put Bad Marie down. It was the most fun I had reading all year.
I have to think Marcy Dermansky is well aware of these coincidences that kick off her novel, and she obviously doesn’t care either, so why should I? The novel is going to work on its own “logic,” one rooted (as Dermansky notes in the aftermatter) in French cinema, so while I’m wary of forgiving something just because the author asks us to, in this case, I’m more than willing.
Each twist, each escalation, I was exclaiming out loud, “no way!” and furiously clicking “Next.” (I read it on the Kindle.) I’d say that the book has a lot of balls, but that wouldn’t be gender correct in this case, so instead I’ll say that Bad Marie was written by someone with big, brass ovaries.
I actually had a hard time putting Room down as well, as their time in the room is about as gripping as anything I’ve read since Bad Marie, but for me, it doesn’t make up for a novel that falls off a cliff after the escape. I think Donoghue gave herself a pretty impossible task, and probably did about as well as she could, but by the end, I was pretty sure this was a better novella than a novel.
Kevin: I never wanted to put Bad Marie down, and I read it in just a couple of days. It was one of those reading experiences where I probably should let go of the stuff that bothers me intellectually or structurally or whatever. What difference does it make as long as I’m enjoying the read? Certainly the more rational way to approach a novel is to ask first, Did I enjoy it? instead of What’s wrong with it? I think sometimes the part of our brain that likes to nitpick a book’s faults—the part that is showing off to prove to you just how smart you are—shouts louder than the part of the brain that is quietly enjoying the ride. It doesn’t mean we should listen more closely to it.
While I appreciate (and even enjoy) the argument, I’m not sure about the conclusions that Weiner reaches at the end of her judgment. It’s hard to claim that Emma Donoghue was overlooked by the media this year. Room received not just two New York Times reviews, but also landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. It was a Best of the Year pick by the Times and the New Yorker. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. On Sept. 28, CNN named Donoghue one of its “Most intriguing people of the week” along with the Dalai Lama. I’m not sure what kind of respect and attention Judge Weiner thinks Emma Donoghue isn’t getting because of her girl parts.
Which is not to dismiss the idea of gender bias in the literary world. I think even just on an intuitive level, everyone in publishing knows it exists and I welcome Jennifer Weiner’s entertaining and important efforts to spark both discussion and soul-searching on the matter. Room might be the wrong flag to march behind, though.
John: The gender bias in the publication and prestige outlet reviewing of literary fiction is undeniable, as evidenced by the VIDA numbers. The response by the big-time cultural gatekeepers to these numbers ranged from thoughtful to obtuse. Outside the literagencia, there’s been some fascinating soul searching.
As someone inclined to cheer on anyone who’s going after cultural elitism, I had no problem with Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult sparking the Franzenfreude discussion. (I did have a problem with the moniker, though, because there was no misfortune of Franzen’s to take actual pleasure in.)
But as you say, it’s not quite so simple. Recently, both Karen Russell (Swamplandia) and Alison Espach (The Adults) received the double Times treatment. A woman has been fiction editor of the New Yorker for eight-plus years. Two out of three of the daily Times reviewers are women. Oprah Winfrey has chosen male authors for her book club 14 times in a row and 18 out of the last 20. Whatever is going on isn’t just a function of the phallocracy of publishing.
It’s also interesting to note that in the marketplace, these cultural gatekeepers seem to have very little sway. Part of this is because so-called literary fiction, which is what these publications primarily cover, does not sell. Of the top 100 best-selling books from last year, the highest-ranked literary fiction title is The Help at no. 8. We have to go all the way down to 39 to find Freedom.
Jonathan Franzen was outsold by four different titles in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and all five of the Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief books. Maybe that’s the Franzenfreude we’re looking for.
Kevin: Statistics lie, John. For instance, statistics will tell you that 536,211 people are better than me at Angry Birds. Freedom was released in the second half of the year, so its numbers should probably be adjusted—it might even rank higher on next year’s list. Still, the appearance of so few literary titles in the top 100 is striking and it probably tells us that “attention that leads to sales” (as Judge Weiner qualified it) might be something of a white whale. In fact, if anyone in publishing could identify exactly what kind of attention that was, they would immediately be submerged in a tank of spinal fluid on the 20th floor of the Random House offices and wired up like the precogs in Minority Report.
So let’s look at men vs. women in the top-40 bestsellers of 2010, regardless of genre. I count five female novelists (there are a few more books than that, as Suzanne Collins and Stephenie Meyer have multiples) vs. 10 male (not counting Decision Points as a work of fiction), a significant testicular bias. Franzen is the only literary novelist in the top 100 with a book published for the first time in 2010, so that’s a problem. The others who would qualify are Stockett, Alice Sebold, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger, and Sara Gruen. So among 2010 blockbuster bestsellers, female literary novelists born after Prohibition seem to have it over on their male counterparts by an extremely unscientific 3-1.
As you point out, the truly alarming stat is the small sample size.
Impressively, Judge Weiner appears on the list at no. 95, edging both the overtestosteroned Tom Clancy and the sexually ambiguous Elf on the Shelf. She was also one spot behind our old punching bag, Nicholas Sparks. Grrr. She’ll get him next year.
Also, I’m not saying that I’m part of the problem, but the two movies at the top of my Netflix queue are Hot Tub Time Machine and Space Chimps.
Up tomorrow, we have author and TMN and ToB co-founder Rosecrans Baldwin weighing in on a match between Savages, a violent, lightning-paced, neo-noir drug novel, and The Finkler Question, the Booker-award winning comic meditation on Jewish identity.
Everybody who had read both those books before the ToB raise your hands.
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