Life-affirming and deeply moving
The Mars Room Author: Rachel Kushner Publisher: Jonathan Cape
AMERICAN author and twice winner of the US National Book Award, Rachel Kushner here tackles the subject of women’s prisons in the United States.
Romy Hall is a stripper at the infamous Mars Room, “the worst and most notorious, the very seediest and most circuslike place there is”. She is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole for the murder of one of her clients. She claims she did it self-defence; the man she killed was a stalker who threatened her safety and that of her seven-year-old son, Jackson.
What brought her to this point is told in flashback, and it is clear that the odds have been stacked against her from the beginning due to poverty, peer influence and drugs, and poor parenting. An inadequate and biased legal system seals her fate.
The usual routines of prison life are described but what is most interesting is how the women cope psychologically with their incarceration and even manage to build a sense of community. There are moments of humour and even joy in the bleakest of settings.
We are drawn into the stories of a number of women, including Buttons, the Hispanic woman who gives birth in a harrowing scene early in the book; the loquacious and bipolar Laura Lipp; and butch lesbian Conan. None of them is innocent of the brutal crimes she is charged with, but the inevitability of their situation is so clearly portrayed.
Other sections of the novel are narrated from the perspective of Gordon Hauser, a rather naive and easily manipulated prison teacher who supplies Romy with books.
The extensive research that Kushner carried out lends the novel its verisimilitude without weighing it down. Kushner is deeply compassionate towards her characters while not excusing their crimes, and the ending of the novel is both life-affirming and deeply moving.