Reviews for The Room and the Chair
"The Room and the Chair is packed with the kind of verbal flourishes that will send the editors of the OED scrambling to update their database. What, for example, would they do with Adams’s perfect use of always in a description of a woman in a dull marriage coming home for another loveless night: ‘She climbed those always stairs’? Her poetic language takes a plot line that has all the requisites of the Washington novel and methodically strips them down. As in the best of Le Carré, this is a world in which nothing is what it seems; but unlike in Le Carré, the drama of the book is as much about hotel rooms exploding in unattractive regions of Iran and mean tween hookers pinching their mothers’ tricks as it is about Adams’s brilliant and innovative use of language. The very title of the book suggests homey domesticity, a novel perhaps set somewhere lovely on Cape Cod or on a Wisconsin farm; but as the book moves forward, the meaning of even these very concrete words, room and chair, becomes charged with unexpected nuance. Finally, in the last few lines of the book, Adams upends the expectations she has so carefully nurtured throughout, providing a creepy and ambiguous denouement that concerns the fate of our heroine, to be sure, but also turns on the even more complicated question of a world’s meaning."
— Ben Moser Harper’s Magazine
"The ‘Room’ is a Washington, D. C., newsroom, an arena Adams, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter formerly at the Washington Post, knows well. In prose clipped, eliding, yet darkly poetic, Adams sets in motion a two-pronged story of covert action and power. Mary, a fighter pilot with a devastating family history, cannot understand why her Viper crashes into the Potomac, but a Special Ops director, dubbed the ‘Chair,’ knows all about it, and he isn’t finished toying with her life. Stanley, the paper’s night editor, wonders why the story of the crash receives minimal play, so he puts the rookie, Vera, an African American former ballerina, on the case, while alpha analyst Don rests on his legendary Watergate laurels, hubristically indifferent to the profound unhappiness of his columnist wife. An Iranian nuclear scientist, child prostitutes, cruel ironies in Afghanistan, the collapse of serious journalism, the wretched secret crimes of an immoral shadow government—Adams fits it all into this masterfully constructed, diabolical cluster-bomb of a novel. A searing tale of lies within lies, not without flashes of humor and beauty, that roars to a halt in a haunted room with a sweat-oiled chair. Read with care."
— Donna Seaman Booklist (starred review)
"Adams, a former Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter at the Washington Post, jumps back and forth between a newsroom in Washington, D. C., and the secretive world of covert military operations in Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The result is a novel of war and news making in contemporary America that reads like a literary jigsaw puzzle . . . Of the many characters in this ambitious work, the one that stands out is a tough female fighter pilot whose story begins and ends the novel. . . . This well-researched literary novel offers an unflinching look at the dangerous world we live in."
— Leslie Patterson Library Journal
"Sparky . . . Adams remains an enormously stimulating writer . . . Capt. Mary Goodwin’s F-16 is patrolling the skies over D. C. when a malfunction forces her to eject, landing in a tree. The 32-year-old pilot has been used as a guinea pig in a secret Pentagon project to prevent suicide attacks. . . . Interest in the crash is slight at the Washington Spectator (read Post), whose top brass are preoccupied with getting beaten to the scoop on another story by the paper’s arch rival. But veteran night editor Stanley Belson smells a good story and has protégée Vera Hastings investigate. Mary and Vera are strong, unconventional women with fascinating pasts—their ferreting would make a fine novel in itself. But there is more, much more. The Spectator newsroom hums with politicking and scuttlebutt, while in the background looms star editor/author Don Grady (stand-in for Bob Woodward) . . . Two sections in Iran show Hoseyn, a defecting nuclear scientist . . . faking his suicide and getting whisked away to Dubai. In another passage, a bombing run executed by Mary and her devoted wingman in Afghanistan results in civilian deaths. . . . The action is riveting, the angles it’s viewed from are different, and ironies salt the narrative."
— Kirkus Reviews
"With The Room and The Chair, Lorraine Adams has confirmed the weighty promise of her first novel, again venturing from one global edge to the next in a deft examination of a war without end. Adams writes with precision and empathy of lives marginalized or discounted by the ambitions of superiors, by institutional imperatives and global ideologies. She understands the tragic scale of this vast struggle, and that every day, we are, all of us—from Washington to Bagram to Guantanamo—more vulnerable and less valuable, and closer to being counted as casualties of one kind or another. This book tallies that cost and does so in utterly human terms. "
— David Simon, creator and writer of The Wire
"Wonderful . . . One of the most thrilling literary novels I've read in years. I read the first 50 pages in a single gasp, then read the next hundred in a sort of awe. Lorraine Adams seems to have it all—a journalist's sharp eye, a poet's ear, a cynic's wisdom and a story-teller's flourish. A touch of DeLillo here, a bit of Elmore Leonard there, some echoes of Martha Gellhorn, but ultimately Adams has a voice all her own. This is a tough, fast and beautiful read."
— Colum McCann, National Book Award Winner for Let the Great World Spin
"Lorraine Adams is a singular and important American writer. "The Room and the Chair" establishes this without question: It is remarkable for its ambitions and its achievements. It's a war novel, a reporter's novel and a psychological thriller. It encompasses the broadest outlines of our world...It's a trippy book that begins with a plane crash and Air Force pilot Mary Goodwin hanging wounded from a tree in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park. From there, it moves through the snows of Hindu Kush to Bagram Air Base, with a detour to the 7-star Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. It takes place in the desert and in the mountains and in the city. But its center is the room of the title, which is the newsroom of a newspaper not so loosely based on the Washington Post, where Adams used to work. This territory is so accurately and perceptively portrayed that anyone who's spent time in a newsroom, especially in the era of print under siege, will recognize the unsavory, nauseating mash-up of romance, hatred, rivalry, corruption and (at the same time) the almost saintly quest for truth. For newbie reporter Vera Hastings, who's trying to make sense of Mary's plane crash, there are uncomfortable feelings as she tries to figure out what is at play in a big story (even the reporters often cannot know).There are all kinds of influences at work on this book: One feels the hand (but, gratefully, not the style) of Henry James, of Joan Didion, of Ward Just, of all the novelists who've written Washington books ( Gore Vidal too). Also in the mix are John le Carré and Norman Mailer. (Have they ever been mentioned together before?)...Indeed, one of the triumphs of this book is that it's a war novel that's mostly about women: Mary, Mabel and Baby as well as Vera, the reporter and truth seeker. Though often unwitting tools and even more often thwarted, they are the fulcrum of the book, lifting what might otherwise be a dazzling thriller into the realm of literature."
— Amy Wilentz The Los Angeles Times
"Like “Harbor,” this new novel is filled with memorable set pieces and remarkable dialogue. Adams is particularly good at capturing the rivalries, power struggles and pecking order in the newsroom, a milieu she knows intimately....As Adams demonstrated in her first novel, she also has a gift for imagining subcultures beyond her immediate ken. With perfect pitch, she evokes the shadow world of intelligence operatives, as well as the macho banter and bravado of fighter pilots. "
— Joshua Hammer The New York Times
"The West's post-9/11 preference for information-boggle over truth-telling gets a blunt reckoning in The Room and the Chair, Lorraine Adams's forceful follow-up to her well-received 2004 novel, Harbor. Adams sidesteps individual blame for this systemic moral torpor...in favor of a collective study of an impressively sprawling, prodigiously flawed ensemble. Indeed, The Room and the Chair makes a compelling case that the deteriorating state of reality-based America is a collective effort—and that few of us can realistically disavow membership from the group...Adopting the propulsion and framework of an intricately plotted political thriller, The Room and the Chair mercilessly critiques our addiction to narratives of Western exceptionalism even as it compels us to turn its pages. This gives the novel drive, but the plot's bleakness can make for tough going, and the heartbreaking climax, in which Goodwin and Holmes converge in Iran for a secret operation that ends in multiple betrayals, has the quality of a car wreck you can't tear your eyes away from. Adams's flair for language mitigates the despair, though: Doggedly full yet lean in effect (note the enigmatic, sublimely passive title), she's especially good at imparting the sloppy reasoning to which her characters so readily default—the verbal confusion of Mabel's drunken reveries and Adam's incessant, elliptical internal stature-tallies are especially masterly. There are moments of high comedy, too, including the editorial meeting in which Vera's story dies the death of a thousand cuts, and even a tiny measure of hope in the evolved, matter-of-fact media savviness of Baby and her crew. It's small comfort, but The Room and the Chair's wrenching frankness feels necessary. Adams has crafted a blunt response to the American government's amateurish imperialism and ass-covering acrobatics, and to the ways that self-serving journalistic elites treat the country's vengeful obsessions as intrigue while letting harsher truths go unreported. By the book's final scene, which finds Mary inhabiting a much different kind of room with its own type of chair, looking away is no longer an option."
— Mark Holcomb, Bookforum
"There is the familiar pleasure of reading a really good novel, and then there is the greater thrill of reading a novel both topical and important in that way that usually only journalism gets to be. Lorraine Adams’ The Room and the Chair is suspenseful and transporting—fine, many good novels are—but it is also that rarer thing: part of the conversation about our seemingly endless War on Terror...The varied settings, intricate plot, and deep cast of characters suggests a cross between Syriana and the fifth season of The Wire—but Adams’ novel is subtler than both. And more deeply felt. Through a roving, omniscient point of view, Adams manages to convey the all-too-human fears and desires of even the more minor players in her drama. This is the great advantage of fiction: It accommodates, more naturally than journalism, the dimension of feeling behind current events."
— Taylor Antrim, Book Beast
"Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Lorraine Adams’s intrigue-stuffed second novel, The Room and the Chair (Knopf), moves swiftly between Washington, Iran, and Afghanistan to illuminate an era of labyrinthine global conflict—and probe the mysterious crash of a female fighter pilot over the Potomac."
— Megan O'Grady, Vogue
"The talented Lorraine Adams’ debut novel, Harbor, was an absolute tour-de-force...The Room And the Chair is a worthy successor..... Her writing is as crisp and intelligent as ever....With its depiction of current-day government subterfuge and media collusion, Adams once again proves she has her finger firmly on the pulse of our complicated current events."
— Poornima Apte Mostly Fiction
"The Room and the Chair is a vivid exploration of newspapers and the intelligence community in the age of terrorism, and is filled with fully-realized characters who haunt long after the novel is finished."
— Largehearted Boy
"Adams evokes the treacherous, starkly beautiful terrain of war-torn Afghanistan and the lurid glitter of Dubai with the dexterity of a champion foreign correspondent channeling Bruce Chatwin. But Adams’s real genius resides in her ability to show at close hand how a dozen-odd, tenuously linked lives play out across the globe. Then, too, there is her vivisection of life inside the newsroom—“The Room”—of a Washington paper: nothing less than a minor miracle of social anthropology."
— Kirk Davis Swinehart The Chicago Tribune
"You get caught up in [The Room and the Chair], and what you see in a spy story is that same old, grand theme that Faulkner talked about: the human heart in conflict with itself."
— Alan Cheuse NPR's All Things Considered
"Adams' prose elevates this from a spy novel to a truly striking work. She plays with rhythm like a poet, moving from staccato to slowness as needed. While told in third person, the language changes, too. The sections focused on the romantic and disappointed wife of a newspaper titan are dreamy and lyrical, the passages between fighter pilot partners curt and jargon-filled. Each of the 10 or so main characters in The Room and the Chair is a person—whole and realized and resisting clichés, the sinker of most espionage thrillers. Instead, Adams’ book is a dense and evocative look at very modern lives in a very modern war. "
— Erin Adair-Hodges Alibi.com
"“Compelling . . . Something more lasting than a roman à clef . . . Adams spin[s] the action between geopolitical hotspots and by introducing a top-secret military program operating outside government boundaries. [But] Adams isn’t playing by all the hackneyed rules. Indeed, she is almost perverse in denying us the genre’s received pleasures: sexual consummations, First Amendment triumphs, evil held at arm’s length. . . . On the page, [her characters] make for good company . . . Adams is so smart about how official Washington works and, like Don DeLillo in Underworld, she is fascinated by how information conceals the world from us. The big newspapers, she argues, are missing the big stories because all they can see are the words in front of their faces . . . [This is] a testament to her own journey: a journalist running up against the limits of journalism and realizing why fiction exists in the first place—to help us find the ‘something, somewhere, in some inch of some infinity’ that lies hidden.” "
— Louis Bayard The Washington Post
Reviews for Harbor
"Captivating. . . . Intricately plotted and beautifully written. . . . A remarkable act of artistic empathy."
— The New York Times Book Review
"Luminous. . . . Heart-stopping. . . . Adams draws her characters with compassion and humor."
— The Washington Post Book World
"Razor-sharp. . . . A vivid, fast-paced entry into an immigrant’s story that is part thriller, part social commentary and at times darkly funny. . . .Terrific. "
— The Miami Herald
"Deeply introspective and tantalizingly beautiful. . . . Harbor is one of the best new novels of the year."
— The Baltimore Sun
"A great, gutsy first novel. . . . Outstanding. "
— Entertainment Weekly
"Complex, vibrant, and imaginative . . . as compelling as it is necessary."
— Esquire
"Endlessly fascinating. . . . Convincing and utterly compelling."
— Time
"Remarkable . . . brilliant. . . . Compelling and haunting. . . . Adams creates an exquisite tension in a character who is at once unseen and yet hunted, both estranged from society and deeply enmeshed in a complicated social order. . . . [Harbor is] a work of art that lifts the veils of many of our assumptions that have formed since 9/11."
— Boston Globe
"Mesmerizing. . . . A ripping read. . . . A heart-rending cautionary tale of American justice gone awry."
— Los Angeles Times Book Review
"[A] great, gutsy first novel. . . . Outstanding."
— Entertainment Weekly
"A chilling story of identity and loss culled from real-life experiences. . . . A cautionary tale that asks readers to be open-minded. . . . [Adams] never loses sight of a story that alternates between incredible moments of joy and sadness."
— Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
"Fascinating. . . . [Adams] writes convincingly from within the hearts and minds of her characters. Though topical, the narrative flies well beneath the headlines."
— The Oregonian
"Brilliant. . . . A strong and disturbing book."
— Annie Proulx Book-of-The Month Club News
"Insightful. . . . Adams adds welcome shading to the usual portrayal of the war on terror." --U.S. News & World Report
“A disturbing tale where suspicion is enough to trump innocence and the consequences of naivet? are potentially disastrous. . . . Adams humanizes the terrorist threat and convincingly shows how a confined worldview can breed generalizations that may hatch tragic consequences."
— San Francisco Chronicle
"Adams displays a gift for detail and character that takes us fully inside the complex systems of survival, kinship, and religious ideology which form Aziz’s world."
— The New Yorker
"Mesmerizing. . . . A timely and grippingly written book, Harbor helps give the war on terror a human face." --People
“Adams drags her characters through the wheels of fate and makes them sing . . . . [Her] sentences move with speed and visual economy, but also contain poetic beauties. . . . A compelling story with great characters--timely, suspenseful and profound."
— Ruminator Review
"Adams is a sharp observer of the current war-on-terror politics. [Harbor] counters the media’s easy perceptions in our age of xenophobia by immersing readers in the depths of myriad characters."
— The Dallas Morning News
"[Adams] writes with verve and is so convincing that it often seems that this is a true story instead of fiction . . . A story about complex interaction between human beings of greatly differing cultures, written by an author of enormous talent."
— Deseret Morning News
"A powerful look at America through immigrant eyes that is not only timely but essential in our post-9/11 society."
— Ft. Worth Star-Telegram