The Mars Room

A Novel

By: Rachel Kushner

Narrated by: Rachel Kushner

TIME’S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018

FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood—“gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled”—and from Stephen King—“The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny.”

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, portrayed with great humor and precision.

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” (The Wall Street Journal), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” (The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” (Entertainment Weekly).

4.31 stars......a bleak tale

The Mars Room is a tale of hopelessness and despair. It is said that Kushner researched the California women's prison system for years while writing this novel, and her efforts are evident in the grim details of this tale of despair. The story provides a look into the lives of those who start out at a disadvantage from birth. It is a story about bad choices, about not having the mental capacity to avoid bad choices, and, ultimately, the result of bad choices. The Mars Room is well written and narrated by the author herself, and Kushner's style and voice is perfect for our doomed female stripper/prisoner/protagonist. This was my first read/listen from the Booker Long List this year.

Overall rating 4.31 stars

An Unblinking, Postmodern Take on Loneliness

There are a lot of ways into this powerful novel, but, as I got toward the end, it occurred to me that it’s most insistently about the nature of loneliness.

That’s a bigger claim than it seems, since this novel is so clearly about other things as well. For one, it’s about the way women suffer in the penal system, how the poor and unfortunate can lose everything because they don’t know how to defend themselves. Here, for instance, Romy might not have gone to jail at all, or might have gone for something dramatically less than two life sentences-plus, if she’d had an attorney able to demonstrate that she’d been the victim of sustained and disturbing sexual stalking.

It also reflects one kind of post-modernist school. A quick search tells me she understands herself as inspired by Don DeLillo (a fine inspiration to select, I’d say) and there’s evidence here of someone who acknowledges the difficulty (impossibility?) of rendering characters in all their dimensionality yet who attempts it all the same. This is a novel of ideas, but it’s simultaneously a story of characters, above all Romy, who recognize the extent to which their denied the full experience of life. One reflection of that is the impressive way Kushner de-eroticizes the business of sex. There are graphic parts here – Romy is a stripper, after all – but we get them as transactional experiences.

And this is also a powerfully feminist novel, one where the experience of women matters in and for itself, independent of men or even masculinity. Yes, most of this is set in a women’s prison, but it’s deeper than that. Romy defines herself on her own terms, on the basis of her own desires and choices. She’s not concerned with what others think or even what they might think. She is entirely of herself, and she shows a refreshing self-awareness throughout.

But I’m struck by the nature of loneliness here because I think part of what Kushner is expressing – depressingly – is that the human condition makes true connection much harder than we can imagine. In what may be my favorite quote in a novel full of rich language and insight, Romy describes her first time shooting up heroin as, “an experience exactly the way a young girl dreams love can be.” The idea is all there in that moment. Romy falls “in love,” but it isn’t with anyone. It’s self-absorbed and detached.

We see this at the level of the story itself. I hope it isn’t much of a [SPOILER] to report that Romy loses everyone she cares even remotely about. The novel opens with her stuck on a bus taking her to the maximum-security prison where she’ll spend the rest of her life, and it follows her through life inside, the eventual death of her mother, the loss of her son as he’s adopted away from her, and through to her brief pointless escape. No one gets in. No one matters. The man she’s killed thinks of her by her stage name as he stalks her; she thinks of him as “Creep” Kennedy. Each casts the other as a character in a private experience, transparently so.

We see it as well at a macro level. I’ve been struck by a species of contemporary novel, informed by postmodernism, that I describe as the “rhizomatic” novel. I think of Colum McCann in particular, but it includes Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Joan Silber’s Fools among others. The striking feature of those novels is that we see a fragmented story that, from a novelist’s eye view if none of the characters’, connects disparate characters in an interconnected web.

In this case, though, Kushner does the opposite. For all that her characters overlap in their encounters, they affect each other only incidentally and without enduring influence. The close of the novel, for instance, brings her heartbreaking realization that, with her recapture, she’ll never get to know her son’s experience. “He is on his path as I am on mine,” she says, and that truth extends in other directions. She learns only very late that her best friend, Eva, has died, and she learns that from Eva’s father who confesses to having been so estranged from his daughter that he didn’t know of the death for years himself. Our second most significant character, Gordon, a would-be English professor who teaches in the prison for a time, agrees to mail a letter from a woman he thinks is crazy; he never knows that it results in the near murder of another character, and he never has cause to reflect on what he might have learned from his throw-away favor for someone. And the Unabomber makes an appearance, writing his manifesto against technology – and against the possibility of human connection – at the same time but isolated and removed from everyone else.

That is, there is something that might look like a vast web connection these characters, but it tears the moment we put any weight on it. None of these characters ultimately influence the others. They’re in dark situations that overlap, but even darker is the sense that we can never come to know them since they can never get beyond the narrow limits of their own experience. It’s a grim picture of a lonely world.

Grit and truth.

This book hits on all cylinders. Turbo charged. A gut punch. It could have gone on and on and on for me. WOW.

It was ok

It held my interest at most times. It was an ok listen. I wish I had saved the credit for something a bit more interesting.

I can't think of any way this book could have been

As a great admirer of Kushner's previous novels I was expecting to love this and I did. Unflinching, unvarnished - like being inside the characters heads. A superb achievement. She did a wonderful job with the narration as well.