4 Books to Watch for in September- Oprah’s Fall Picks!
A little boy discovers that freedom is where you find it.Room
By Emma Donoghue
336 pages; Little, Brown
Photo: Ben Goldstein/Studio D
Room
By Emma Donoghue
336 pages; Little, Brown
Imagine that you are 5 years old and growing up in an 11-by-11 backyard shack. You have never been outside, you sleep in a makeshift closet, and the only other human being you’ve ever met is your mother. That’s the lot of little Jack, the narrator-hero of Emma Donoghue’s Room, a novel so disturbing that we defy you to stop thinking about it, days later. While Jack only vaguely understands how he and Ma got here, his commentary reveals that he was born in this tiny room to Ma and her kidnapper, who still comes by to rape her at night. Nevertheless, in some twisted way, mother and son have a model relationship: They are fiercely attached, have “normal” conversations and arguments, and rituals for meals, bathtime, and games. In fact, it is only after they successfully engineer a thrilling escape that Jack’s life becomes unsettled; like all children, he begins to long for what he had, what he thought was a regular life. This blend of allegory and true crime (Donoghue has said she was influenced by several recent news stories) is beautifully served by Jack’s wise but innocent voice: When he bangs his head on a faucet, he hears, “Careful”—and wonders, “Why do persons only say that after the hurt?” And while a first-person, child-narrated tale can sometimes feel like a gimmick, the enviable trick here is that Donoghue makes you want to stay with Ma and Jack, whether they’re in their own private prison or out in the so-called free world
The Bluest Eye
Oprah’s Book Club
By Julia Glass
416 pages; Pantheon
Some books grab you from the first page. Julia Glass’s novel, The Widower’s Tale, lightly touches you on the shoulder and requests your kind attention to an enchanting story of familial bonds and late-life romance. Expect to be infatuated with Glass’s protagonist, 70-year-old Percy Darling, he of the generous soul, dry wit, and courtly manners. Living alone in a rural enclave near Boston, he clings to the emotional reticence he cultivated after losing his wife—until he falls for the much younger Sarah. Making love to her for the first time, he’s a poignant combination of passion and vulnerability. “She did not, thank heaven, tell me that I was handsome or virile or sexy. She just closed her eyes again and wrapped herself more tightly around me.” Meanwhile, a rich mix of other characters play out their own dramas in a leisurely fashion. But who cares how long the journey takes when you’re in such good company?
The Dramatic Tale of Black MigrationThe Warmth of Other Suns
By Isabel Wilkerson
640 pages; Random House
Between 1915 and 1970, as lynching became public spectacle, as a nicely dressed black woman might be arrested for “acting white,” as black sections of towns were burned down or terrorized, black sharecroppers and surgeons quietly fled the South for New York City, Detroit, Oakland—as far as they could possibly go. It was, as Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson masterfully demonstrates in The Warmth of Other Suns, this leaderless “silent pilgrimage” that brought us James Baldwin, Miles Davis, and the forebears of Michelle Obama; it precipitated the civil rights movement and created our cities and art forms. Wilkerson builds her lucid analysis on the journey her parents took and on the biographies of three who made the trip: George Swanson Starling, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, who fled Mississippi for Chicago after a relative was beaten close to death for supposedly stealing a white man’s turkeys. Each narrative becomes a rich novella thanks to Wilkerson’s instinct for pacing and for her subjects’ idiosyncrasies. Scholarly but very readable, this book, for all its rigor, is so absorbing, it should come with a caveat: Pick it up only when you can lose yourself entirely.
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