The Mars Room review: Rachel Kushner interrogates the American Dream
FICTION
The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner
Jonathan Cape, $32.99
The kind of praise Rachel Kushner received for her second novel, The Flamethrowers, was a literary anointment of sorts. Laura Miller, in Salon, related the "gobsmacked" response by critics such as James Wood in The New Yorker ("scintillatingly alive") and Dwight Garner in The New York Times (who proclaimed Kushner, like her narrator, now a "girl they expected things of") to the author's confident stride into the traditionally male arena of Great American Novel – one that seeks to express something innate about America through the prism of its fictional world.
The Flamethrowers, set between the '70s New York art scene, politically volatile Italy, and motorcycle racing in Utah, combined vivid characters and prose with a buzz of ideas about American identity at a time of global transformation. In this way, it followed logically from Kushner's impressive debut, Telex from Cuba, which viewed America from a distance – through an ex-pat community imperfectly exporting the American Dream in pre-revolutionary Cuba.
Kushner's third novel, The Mars Room, is longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize. It's an explicitly gendered interrogation of the American Dream now, primarily narrated by California sex worker Romy (mother of a young son), jailed for killing her stalker. Like the memoir-turned-Netflix-series Orange is the New Black, this novel explores a kaleidoscope of prison identities and experiences through the guiding perspective of a white narrator-observer.
Romy is a prison Scheherazade, spinning stories – of the people she observes and her past life in a San Francisco she paints in a regional shade of California noir – to ward off the thoughts she prefers to block out. She is backed by a chorus of occasional voices, most fleeting (various fellow inmates, her stalker). Most significant is prison educator Gordon, whose twin status as frustrated intellectual and peripheral member of the prison community enables him to analyse and reflect, sometimes ventriloquising (it seems) for the author. "People from your family were in prison, whole swaths of your community, and it was part of life to eventually go there. So, you were born f---ed."
Romy may be new to prison, but its wary, stratified, defensive culture is familiar to her from growing up in the kind of household where she could wander the streets after dark aged 11, from the work culture at The Mars Room strip club, and even waitressing at a chain restaurant, where she first learned to answer to a number.
Unlike Orange is the New Black's Piper Chapman, Romy is – though innately vulnerable – knowing rather than naive. Despite first impressions, this novel is more meaningfully compared to Adrian Nicole Le Blanc's classic immersive non-fiction account of a Puerto Rican Bronx family with prison ties, Random Family, for its similarly canny and emotionally intelligent excavation of the social faultlines that perpetuate generational disadvantage.
On one level, The Mars Room is a ripping story: a prison narrative that mirrors the extremes of human nature through the dramatic stories of its inmates. Crime stories are increasingly recognised for their potential as gateways to essential truths about society itself; this is true here.
Love and the lack of it, power and the lack of it, the search for meaning and self-worth: these same forces pulse beneath the varied experiences and perspectives woven into the novel. And sex appeal, the main currency available to the women, is double-edged and ultimately weak, as likely to be turned against those who wield it as not.
This novel is also a damning critique of 21st-century extreme capitalism, a ruthlessly industrialised world whose efficiency comes at the expense of empathy for individuals – even as it cites individual responsibility as its guiding mantra. This is recited by prison and legal workers: the inmates have made choices that led to their imprisonment, choices they've exchanged for their human rights, crucially including motherhood. But in The Mars Room, Kushner perceptively illuminates how those choices are often brutally limited by available resources.
Jo Case is an Adelaide-based writer and bookseller.
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