Review: The Mars Room (2018) by Rachel Kushner

The Mars Room is a good book and an important book (ie one that might teach you something) and one that left me in a sad and contemplative state at the end. It's about women in prison, what got them in prison, what their life is like in prison, what they left behind when they entered prison. Where Orange is the New Black mixes in humor with prison life, there is nothing to smile about with these women some of whom will spend out their natural live incarciated. The headline of a review in The New York Times called it "blackly comic" but if there are such elements they didn't click with me.

Click to view on
Amazon

The book opens and closes with Romy Leslie Hall, inmate W314159, serving two consecutive life sentences plus six years. Romy did what she was convicted of but the account of her trial and legal counsel nake you frustrated, if not angry with the legal system. You might even be able to put yourself in her place. She could have had a future after after prison if things had been handled differently.

Romy is also a loving mother albeit one who made a lot of bad decisions. Many of her flashbacks are about her son Jackson and this humanizes her.

For all her guilt, Romy is still an intelligent and appealing if not likable character. With a poor home life and wild and lawless adolescence, Romy fell into drug abuse and prostitution and work as a stripper. The Mars Room in the book's title is a San Francisco strip club where she worked. It isn't a bad gig, relatively speaking, except for the regular who becomes obsessed with her and her stalker. There is nothing glamorous about The Mars Room; it is a gritty, dirty, hostile environment.

In prison, as Romy tries to keep her head down and learn the ropes, the author explains administrative segregation (or ad seq and called the SHU in Orange is the New Black), how to communicate between cells, make prison hooch, work programs, racial divides, the contempt and hostility of the guards, and he day-to-day experience of life behind bars, and how certain behaviors become automatic. At one point Romy observes "I wasn't much of a liar before prison.". She has this poignant observation:

You go to ad seg and you don't stop having feelings.  You hear a woman cry and it's real. It's not a courtroom, where they ask all the pertinent and wrong questions, the niggling repeated demands for details, to sort contradictions and establish intent.  The quiet of the cell is where the real question lingers in the mind of a woman. The one true question, impossible to answer. The why did you. The how. Not the practical how, the other one. How could you have done such a thing. How could you.

The Mars Room has an unusual structure that pulled me into the reading experience. It isn''t linear and a narrative might be interrupted with a reflection on some other event. That doesn't make sense, I know but I'm not sure how to describe it. Within a chapter you have section inserted in the narrative with short, black, dividing bars. I like this technique; it made me curious what was going to appear next. The Romy storyline jumps around in time between Romy growing up and turning to prostitution and stripping and her life in prison.

In addition to the main Romy storyline the book gives us the stories of other people who interact with Romy. There is Gordon, a teacher, dissatisfied with his life, who lives in an isolated cabin and reads the writings of Unibomber Ted Kaczynski, her cellies, several death row inmates and, through one, Betty, the story of an ex-cop himself now an inmate.

This is a hard book for me to write about. While I enjoyed it very much, I can't put my finger exactly on why I enjoyed. There is a lot going on with several stories weaving around the narrative. A review cited below wouldprefer the book have a strong single plot. The lack of a plot was not something that bothered me. In fact, it kept me interesed to see what would be revealed next.

Kushner doesn't glorify prison or try to build unwarranted sympathy for the characters. These are people who did bad things but the author does help us see them as people. Kushner is certainly an excellent writer who knows how to tell a story and I intend to read her other works. As I said at the top, it left me feeling sad that such stories and situations happen and will continue to happen.

Here are some other reviews to give you other views on this book. I went five pages deep in a Google search and didn't find a blog review so these are from commercial web pages. There are a lot of them. I particularly like the review in Slate

Things Did Not Go Differently: Rachel Krusner's sorrowful, hard-boiled The Mars Room by Laura Miller in Slate.
The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner — what it means to be poor and female in America by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian
Fiction in Review: The Mars Room by Abigail Deutsch in the Yale Review
What is Missing From Rachel Kushner's New The Mars Room? Besides Plot. By Christian Lorentzen in Vulture.
Things Did Not go Differently