The Mars Room (2018)
Why this one?
Having read and enjoyed (in the main!) Kushner’s 2024 Booker-shortlisted Creation Lake, I wanted to check out more of her work.
Rachel Kushner (1968- ; active 1996- ) was born in Eugene, Oregon, USA. Her parents worth both scientists, and described by Kushner as 'deeply unconventional people from the beatnik generation'. She began her bachelors degree in political economy at the University of California, Berkeley, aged just 16. She later earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.
Her first novel, Telex from Cuba, was published in 2008, and was a finalist fo that year's National Book Award. Her second novel, 2013's The Flamethrowers, repeated that feat as well as being featured in many publications' year-end lists. Her third, The Mars Room (2018) saw her shortlisted for the Booker for the first time, eventually losing out to Anna Burns' Milkman. She was shortlisted again for 2024’s prize, which went to Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. She has also published a short story collection (The Strange Case of Rachel K; 2015) and a collection of essays (The Hard Crowd; 2021).
Thoughts, etc.
The Mars Room has as its protagonist Romy Hall, a San Francisco single mother and erstwhile stripper who is serving two life sentences in Stanville Correctional Facility for murder. She has killed a man, that much is true, but a man who was going to great lengths to stalk her, having struck up what he saw as a ‘relationship’ in the Mars Room, the strip club Romy performed in. That she has committed a crime is not disputed, but the fragments we see of her trial expose the fact that the criminal justice system leaves no room for nuance. Her primary concern in prison is initially survival, but shifts to the wellbeing of her young son Jackson once she hears that her mother, his guardian, has died.
Alongside Romy’s main narrative, the novel threads in sections told from other (often male) perspectives. There’s a chapter told from the perspective of her stalker, which adds layers to the book’s complexity. Another is told in the voice of an ex-cop, Doc, memorably awful and now imprisoned himself for the meaningless murder of a young Black man. Yet even here, there is nuance: Doc himself has been the subject of abuse at the hands of his father. Most unusually of all, there are punctuating sections throughout the book taken directly from the diaries of Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber.
The latter are introduced as reading material of the most significant male character in the book, Gordon Hauser, a teacher who finds himself at Romy’s prison. He’s a deeply ambiguous figure, who has a habit of developing obsessions for his imprisoned pupils (including Romy), makes patronizing asssumptions about their intelligence and spends hours digging on the internet to understand his female pupils, ostensibly in an attempt to purposelessly ‘prove their innocence’. At the same time he seems like a relative figure of kindness in a book filled with blankly vicious prison employees, and at least tries to help Romy navigate the Kafkaesque layers that the state has installed to keep her from finding out anything about her son once he is taken into care.
In the prison itself, there’s a vividly drawn collection of characters, from the sympathetic (Conan, a transgender character) to the repulsive (the appropriately named Laura Lipp and ‘the Norse’, an openly Nazi inmate) giving a detailed, eye-opening and often darkly humorous take on life inside a US jail in the age of Mass Incarceration. These characters, their wild backstories and unlikely gallows humour, are the life and heart of the book, keep it from being a straightforwardly depressing treatise and layering in some much needed entertainment. Despite the fact that some if not all of them have slightly cartoonish quirks, they also feel believable and rounded, likely as a result of Kushner’s extensive experience of volunteer work in a women’s prison, with the Justice Now organisation.
Romy herself is a rich and complex character, given detailed backstory of both her youth in San Francisco and her time at the Mars Room. Her most sympathetic and true moments, though, are those in which we glimpse the desperation of a mother separated from her child. Romy’s own despair is portended early in the book by a brutally physical incident in which a young mother gives birth soon after arriving at the prison. With grim inevitability, the newborn is rapidly and violently removed from its mother, with no care or sympathy displayed by the employees and the inmates left (as throughout) to group together to offer anything like humanity to each other. This incident pales when compared to Romy’s indescribable anguish at realising Jackson has nobody to care for him and then that she will likely never see him again. Her pleas to the prison authorities are met with the emotionless equivalent of ‘well, you should have thought of that before getting locked up’. Having initially accepted her fate, it’s this that leads Romy down increasingly desperate pathways in an attempt to find a way out of her nightmare, and to the novel’s beautiful but devastating conclusion.
I’m very much glad that I picked this one up. It feels like a timely read, given that the epidemic of incarceration in the US seems only likely to increase with the impending change in political landscape, as well as a more universal one, which deals with eternally relevant issues of ‘justice’ and whether such a thing can truly exist, or be in any way served by retributive imprisonment on an industrial scale. Like Creation Lake, it draws together some unlikely bedfellows from the wider culture, and occasionally takes the reader on some pretty wild diversions and digressions. As with the more recent book, it’s entertaining and thought-provoking while at times straying into slightly ridiculous territory, but that only makes it the more enjoyable from my perspective. It’s a more focused and coherent book overall though, and one that’s absolutely worth checking out.
Score
9
A pacey book with thrills and humour, but one with deep (yet not didactic) themes and moments of genuine emotion and heartbreak. This definitely won’t be the last of her books that I read.
Next up
Possibly something else upcoming via Netgalley.
