The Dream Room

It's the 1960s. David Speijir, 12 years old, is living at home with his parents in the Netherlands. David's first love is cooking. His father is a former pilot; his mother a nurse. With money tight, the entire family begins assembling model airplanes for sale. While David is aware of the growing tension between his parents, he is powerless to prevent it, powerless to avert the bitterly stormy coastal night when it all comes apart. THE DREAM ROOM isn't an easy novel to understand. It's hardly more than a hundred pages long and the author, Moring, employs a minimalist style, telling much of the story without using words. The ambiguous ending, set years later in the 1990s, raises as many questions as it answers. I came away from the book uncertain, confused, not sure whether my desire for resolution was simply a failure on my part to understand what Moring had created, or a failure on his part to properly create it. My overall impression is of a coming-of-age story, a tale that uses the enigmatic to highlight how seldom life turns out the way we expect. And perhaps also the story's theme is about our dreams, about the way they affect us without our even knowing it. Because I didn't fully understand THE DREAM ROOM, I was at a loss to rate it. I finally settled on four stars because the novel was well written enough that I was bothered by the perplexity. Had it been a failure, I would not have given it a second thought.