Class, poverty are story’s villains
“The Mars Room” begins in 2003, aboard a bus travelling by night to a California women’s prison facility. Author Rachel Kushner uses that confinement — a mobile version of the enduring one ahead — to acquaint us with some of the striking, sui generis characters who populate the next 300-plus pages. One is our protagonist, 29-year-old Romy Hall, who’s about to begin serving two subsequent life sentences for murder.
Romy’s victim stalked her relentlessly when she was a lap dancer at the Mars Room, a San Francisco strip club so skeevy that “if your tattoos weren’t misspelled you were hot property.” We know this, but her trial judge didn’t, the underskilled, overworked public defender assigned to her case, helpless against wily prosecutors who “looked like rich, well-rested Republicans,” having failed to get it admitted as evidence.
“The Mars Room” abounds with such parallel realities. The most obvious is between prison, where most of the novel takes place, and the outside world. Another is San Francisco where, in flashbacks, a teenaged Romy roams an alternate city to that of “rainbow flags or Beat poetry or steep crooked streets” in search of drugs.
“I knew that for everyone else in the world, the Golden Gate Bridge was considered something special, but to me and my friends it was nothing,” she says.
We see it, too, in Gordon Hauser, who takes a teaching job at the prison believing he can “uncage” his students through books. Imagining Thoreau, he rents a cabin in the woods, but the more the women draw him into their personal lives — Romy, sensing his pliability, tries to use him to get information about her son — the more our own thoughts stray to Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, whose journal entries pepper the novel.
Early hints suggest we’re headed into thriller territory. But though the circumstances around Romy’s crime are eventually filled in, it’s apparent by the novel’s midway point that Kushner’s interests lie elsewhere. “The Mars Room” is to its phenomenal predecessor, “The Flamethrowers,” set in arty, ’90s New York, what David Simon’s show “Treme” was to “The Wire”: it’s less a puzzle than a portrait, and Kushner seems less to have written these characters than surrendered herself to them.
“The Flamethrowers” was notable for its flashy similes; here they’re used sparingly, to heightened effect, as with a description of a boy in a drug house as “thin and lithe with hair as blondly colourless as lice egg casings.”
Our sympathies lie squarely with the novel’s complex, flawed women, yet even the bad guys get enough back story that it’s hard to condemn them without reservation. The real villains here are class, poverty and institutional corrosion; Kushner is that rare writer who can unpreachingly render them flesh.
Emily Donaldson is the editor of Canadian Notes & Queries