What Is Missing From Rachel Kushner's New The Mars Room? Besides Plot.

Novelist Rachel Kushner, at home in Los Angeles, 2013. Photo: Ricardo DeAratanha/LA Times via Getty Images

When a particular quotation keeps appearing before your optics, it must be speaking to the times. This twelvemonth I continue coming across a line of Stendhal's: "Politics in a literary work, is like a gunshot in the heart of a concert, something vulgar, and however, something which is impossible to ignore." It pops up in Lisa Halliday'southward recent Asymmetry, and it was in my caput every bit I was reading Rachel Kushner's new novel of incarceration, The Mars Room. It's a book that urgently embraces the vulgar and leaves y'all with the feeling that the concert has been staged then that the reader will hear the gunshots fired.

All three of Kushner's novels are political, but in her previous novels, both historical fiction, politics was glimpsed at a remove of at least a few decades: Telex from Cuba (2008) was fix in Cuba on the eve of revolution; The Flamethrowers linked the proto-Fascist futurist avant-garde of post-World War I Italy to the leftist advanced of 1970s New York. The Mars Room unfolds mostly in California during the George W. Bush administration (not exactly a historical novel, then; the German term is Zeitroman: a fiction near the times the author has lived through). Information technology examines conditions that are ongoing and — in terms of statistics to practise with incarceration, including incarceration of women — worsening. The novel's matrix radiates out from Stanville, a women's prison in the Central Valley where one-time-narrator Romy Hall is serving ii life sentences plus six years for killing a homo who was stalking her.

The novel'south timeline stretches dorsum through Romy's childhood and her days as a dancer at the San Francisco strip club that gives the book its title, and it takes in many characters both cardinal and peripheral to her story. Nosotros meet the human being who stalked her, Kurt Kennedy, and get a glimpse of his addled (from booze, and painkillers when he can get his hands on them), and malignantly obsessive listen. We meet the childhood friends Romy ran with on the streets of San Francisco's Sunset District in the 1980s; Jimmy Darling, a filmmaker and fine art school instructor who was "slumming" with Romy noncommittally; and Jackson, her son from an affair with a bouncer at another club (a deadbeat soon dead of an overdose), now orphaned after the decease of Romy's mother and lost to her every bit a ward of the state. At Stanville a set up of vividly drawn inmates gather around Romy in the grade of a makeshift family; other inmates hover menacingly in their orbit. There'due south likewise Gordon Hauser, a grad school dropout who teaches Romy's prison class, lives solitary in a mountain shack, and contemplates the difference between Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski. Threaded loosely to the chief narrative is the story of Md, a corrupt cop serving time for his piece of work as a contract killer for another inmate at Stanville.

Kushner is an gentleman of Don DeLillo's 1997 masterpiece Underworld, and provided a succinct description of it in a 2015 essay for the Guardian: "while big structures of history shape the characters (as they practice us), this novel is likewise filled with glimpses of people solitary and together with their private faiths, their unspeakable thoughts, artfully converted to language, into naked epiphany, subtle and precise." This could also serve as a description of Kushner's books, or what they're attempting, and the crux of these novels is the way they balance the structural and the private. In The Flamethrowers most of the characters are artists, and the novel is infused with ideas almost fine art that sometimes overwhelm their private lives, including ideas nearly the blurring of art and life. The characters at times seem like ciphers for the author'due south art historical project. The ideas sparkle but the plotting — especially a strand to do with adultery — is thin by comparing. In that location'south a similar imbalance at work in The Mars Room.

The politics of The Mars Room are pessimistic, and Kushner's vision of the American carceral archipelago and the justice system in full general is relentlessly and convincingly grim. Romy was terrorized by the man she killed, but that doesn't come into her case in court, largely considering her public defender is one-time, tired, incompetent, and possibly drunkard. She and her mother lack the resource to afford anything better, she's unwilling to accept a plea bargain, and once convicted she has no recourse to appeal. One time she arrives at Stanville, she's disciplined by indifferent or sadistic guards and things but get worse. Kushner'due south narrative attention turns to the economy of prison life in forensic detail. To anyone without experience of prison house this will be jarring and appalling. Within the texture of the novel, it'south besides bluntly didactic.
Stanville's codes and transactions are conjured in a style that mimics the bourgeois novel of manners, merely the inversion has the effect of distracting y'all from the experience of imprisonment, even as you sense you lot're existence tapped on the shoulder and told, This is what information technology'south similar to be in prison. It'southward an authenticity that diminishes as the particulars of deprivation accumulate.

Like Reno — who narrates nearly of The Flamethrowers and represents the young woman who moves to New York with as much ambition as innocence only as well often seems merely a blank slate — Romy comes beyond as more concept than grapheme. She's a victim of circumstance (no way out of dancing at the Mars Room, then no mode out of being stalked) until she'due south a victim of the justice system. She'due south undeniably sympathetic merely not always interesting. We hear a lot of anecdotes from her past life, merely in bits that lose their energy as presently as they're told. Her son is relentlessly idealized until he seems less similar a male child than a device to pull at readers' and characters' heartstrings. It's a churlish matter to say most the way a mother thinks of a son from whom she's been separated for years (and perhaps permanently), just it's striking in dissimilarity to the residuum of the novel's cast. The voices of other inmates at Stanville — particularly those of Conan, a blackness trans human being who one night becomes her lover, and of Laura Lipp, a Christian girl from a middle-class family who murdered her ain child and is a prison pariah — intrude with a comic force considering they're largely free of the conceptual burdens Romy bears. They're the best matter in the book.

The novel grows more and more essayistic every bit information technology goes on, leaving aside Romy'south backstory and taking upwardly those of peripheral characters, generally in third person. Romy's voice veers in register, sometimes inside the same paragraph, between a hardboiled street colloquial and an explanatory, near bureaucratic, clinical tone deployed to explain prison house procedures downwards to the dimensions of the cage. The third-person sections are fifty-fifty more unstable, lurching from gratuitous indirect discourse to what seems like authorial commentary. Equally the predatory police officer Medico sits in his cell bunk trying to masturbate, he remembers one of his conquests on the outside: "What Doc liked nearly the bartender at Las Brisas was a sense of radical acceptance she offered. Sometimes ejaculating all over someone is a way for that person to communicate to y'all that they take yous completely and totally as you are." Are these the thoughts of a crooked cop or of the progressive therapist he never had the luck to run into? These lapses in signal of view add together to the sense that we're beingness taught a lesson (one nosotros'd probably agree with, about cycles of abuse) more we're being told a story.

Of course, there tin be something bracing about being taught a lesson, with meticulously researched and clinically delivered details, that confirms your beliefs. That feeling is called outrage, and at that place's no denying that the indignation The Mars Room aims to spark is the righteous sort.

Information technology'south fair to want more from a novel than the sensation of nodding your caput in agreement, but The Mars Room does belong to a venerable tradition in American literature. It partakes of the social realism of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis, and the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser and Jack London. Incarceration, in The Mars Room, resembles the blizzard that bites the hero of London'south To Build a Fire: an extensive system that'southward inescapable and deadly. The mission of these writers was to open up the optics of middle-class readers to shadowy iniquities, to the plights of fellow citizens crushed by larger forces. That'due south a task the American novel hasn't causeless in a long time, only it remains alive in journalism, film, and tv set.

Kushner invokes other literary traditions within The Mars Room as its narrative takes on an increasing strain of cultural criticism. Footling essays almost country music and Dostoevsky are placed in the minds of characters, showing a somewhat heavy authorial hand. In prison GED class, Gordon gives Romy books to read, among them Choice-Up by Charles Willeford and Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson. Inviting comparisons to Willeford's vicious lurid and Johnson's numinous lyricism advise other avenues The Mars Room might have taken.
Without either a strong plot (a thin i does arise late in the book) or a religious framework, the novel is rarely entertaining or beautiful. Merely peradventure suspense and beauty are mere luxuries when the mission is righteous.

*A version of this article appears in the May 14, 2018, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

What Is Missing From Rachel Kushner's New The Mars Room?