What the blurb tells us:
Wealthy Richard Walker has just dies, leaving his country house full of rooms packed with the detritus of a lifetime. His estranged family — bitter ex-wife Caroline, troubled teenage son Trenton, and unforgiving daughter Minna — have arrived for their inheritance. But the Walkers are not alone.
Prim Alice and the cynical Sandra, long dead former residents bound to the house, linger within its claustrophobic walls. Jostling for space, memory, and supremacy, they observe the family, trading barbs and reminiscences about their past lives.
The living and the dead are each haunted by painful truths that will soon surface with explosive force.
Until the second paragraph, this sound like a familiar trope. Yet the moment some ghosts enter the picture, we know we’re in for something less well-known. Lauren Oliver’s Rooms is not just about the Walkers. This is about their house as well…
FIY: As so often, SPOILERS included, so proceed at your own risk 🙂
Ghastly family and ghostly lodgers
I know Minna had a rough start. All those years in that crusty basement practicing piano until her fingers ached and God knows what else. But listen, we all get served a deck with some cards missing. Get up and get on with it, is what I say. I’ve done my reading about all of it: neuroses, psychoses, anxieties, and compulsions, blah, blah. I used to work for the Dr Howard Rivers, of the Rivers Center for Psychiatric Development, for God’s sake. And I’ve seen my fair share of churches and twelve steps.
It all boils down to the same thing: are you going to play the cards you got, or are you going to fold?
Sandra has seen a lot, and she can remember most of it well. Having died in the house’s study, she also has a lot of time remembering. And she is definitely not the most compassionate mind. Her counterpart is Alice, the ghost of the first owner of the house, who desperately wants to move on. Because Alice has been here the longest, she has seen the most. And she is tired of it.
I imagined lying down with Thomas under a blanket filled with down, talking late into the night, waking up with the tips of our noses cold and the windows patterned with frost. I imagined that we would be happy together, that together, we would be home.
Alice is the oldest protagonist and the longest occupant of the house. Her voice reminded me of John Williams’ Stoner and many Willy Vlautin’s main protagonists. Talking about hope, love, a good life. And how fast all that can change. She tells not only her own but also the Walkers’ story, and even Sandra’s.
Richard Walker’s estranged family came to collect what he has left behind, and they are not alone. The old house is haunted by former occupants, Alice, a cliche housewife from the 1940s/50s, and Sandra, a raunchy former office worker, who tried to drown her difficult childhood and youth in too much alcohol and relationships with the wrong men. The Walkers don’t realize they are sharing the house with two ghosts. Only Trenton — who barely survived a near-fatal car crash a few months earlier — senses their presence and sometimes even hears their voices, fearing that he’s finally going crazy.
Much to write home about
We accompany the Walker family and their ghostly lodgers on their trip down memory lane, to sit and watch tragedies unfold. Structured in 11 parts that represent different rooms of the house, the stories we read are no fun. Love won and lost, violence, neglect, abuse, addiction, near-death experience, suicide — Lauren Oliver included nearly every horrible thing that could happen to someone and ascribe it to one (or several) of the characters. Told in different POVs, with Sandra and Alice as first-person narrators while the story of the Walkers and their entourage is told in third person. Their stories are intermingled, so we see the Walker family through the eyes of Sandra and Alice in their chapters.
I love the use of different POVs to tell a story, portraying a character and their story piece by piece, so I liked the structure of the book. Still, I think that depending on the character, Oliver didn’t use the huge possibilities this technique offers and preferred to stay on the surface. So some of these characters feel less like ‘real people’ and more like tableaus of a life lived according to certain stereotypes. Consequently, you don’t necessarily sympathize with a character, but with the stereotypes they represent.
Minna, for example, depicted as a surgically enhanced nymphomaniac, of course only beds every guy she meets because she wants to fill the void she feels deep down with love and affection — or at least sex. Also, Caroline and Trenton represent their respective stereotype just as clear and strong as Minna, and even Alice and Sandra are stand-ins for how people of other generations and (cultural) backgrounds lived their lives. With less drama and more depth, these people may have stronger, more complex stories to tell — alas, it’s not to be.
Not every storyline is convincing, with some events reminding me of cheap showmanship rather than real purpose.Furthermore, on several occasions, Oliver hints at something but doesn’t follow through. Examples needed? While we learn that Trenton was in a car accident and nearly died, we never find out what exactly happened — something that I would like to know, especially since the accident is repeatedly mentioned and seems to be an important part of his story. Amy, Minna’s daughter, seems to be Minna’s attempt to try and fill the void inside her, and is otherwise used as a sort of prop when needed regarding the plotline. Alice once mentions that she turned her back on her family when marrying her husband, but there is no further explanation for what happened and why — this is simply another piece of the puzzle of why she stayed in an unhappy marriage. Another cliche. There is a character whose presence doesn’t fulfill much purpose except to construct one more side narrative that is of no importance. This leaves the reader with the less than favorable impression of having one more agenda pushed in one’s face.
Conclusion
Overall, I didn’t mind these few glitches — no need for perfection when the book was intriguing enough in the first place. I truly enjoyed Lauren Oliver’s Rooms and wanted to find out how it will end, hence I read it in one day.Enjoying the book, I still see its flaws (as mentioned above). Having said that, I would still recommend it for a rainy, lazy Sunday in a cozy reading nook. And it could be one book I would read again one day, just because I forgot enough about it to make it interesting again.
Have you read it? What did you think? Did you like it?