Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room
RACHEL KUSHNER’S THE MARS ROOM
Rachel Kushner has published three novels. With thriller-like pacing and zigzagging narratives, her books have alighted on Cuba on the verge of revolution (Telex From Cuba, 2008), the Bonneville Salt Flats of Utah and the turbulent student riots of 1970s Italy (The Flamethrowers, 2013), and a women’s prison in present-day California’s Central Valley (The Mars Room, out May 1 from Scribner). Kushner’s novels are stuffed to the gills with meaningful side trips, seemingly tossed-off but piercing observations, and apparitions who nonetheless possess fully formed backstories. Though the people who populate her plots often seem to teeter on the knife-edge between a bottomless pit and chaos, their stories capture the endless possibilities, and sometimes the futility, of connection — between people, classes, countries. Kushner has been breathlessly compared to Thomas Pynchon, Joan Didion, and Robert Stone; she is the kind of iconoclastic, effortlessly cool writer who excites reviewers. She is the only author ever to receive National Book Award nominations in fiction for both a first and second novel.
Kushner joins radio broadcaster Michael Silverblatt in conversation on Wednesday, April 18, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, an event sponsored by the Lannan Foundation’s Readings & Conversations series. Kushner was born in Eugene, Oregon, in 1968, to two beatnik parents in a house loaded with books. She understood from a young age, as she said to novelist Hari Kunzru in 2013, that she was meant to be a writer. “I did what was expected of me, which is a bit lame, but there you have it: I have much more admiration for sui generis people who come from homes that don’t respect art,” she told Kunzru.
She studied political economy at the University of California - Berkeley, concentrating on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. After college, she rode her Moto Guzzi around San Francisco, working in nightclubs, until she decided to pursue an MFA in fiction at Columbia University at age twenty-six. In a refreshing departure from the publishing industry’s fixation on newly minted MFA wunderkinds, she has said she didn’t get the idea for her first novel until after she had obtained her degree, and then it took her six years to write it.
She is two weeks away from the publication of The Mars Room, which Sasha Frere-Jones, writing in Bookforum, has already called “a gorgeous, slow, contemplative ride.” In The Mars Room, the frenetic pace and continental scope of The Flamethrowers is traded for a novel of confinement that seeks to transcend its institutional monotony. At Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, San Francisco stripper Romy Hall is serving out consecutive life sentences for having killed her stalker. As the story of her crime unspools, interestingly but without any urgency, we watch Romy and her cellmates navigate a surreal interstitial journey to Stanville on a bus from county jail. Their hands yoked together, they travel north through the heart of California, past the sloping roller coasters of Valencia’s Magic Mountain, through an uncomfortable night haunted by the passing shadows of eucalyptus trees and the banal babbling of a Medea-like woman who is incarcerated for having murdered her child to spite its father. A prisoner dies on the bus, and shortly after arriving at Stanville, another goes into a miserable, gutwrenching labor. But death and suffering are treated as asides; the novel’s action is rooted in the women’s interactions with each other.
As in the Netflix women-in-prison series Orange Is the New Black — which takes a considerably more
In the end, what the women have is their shared humanity. Their consciousness is heightened by their confinement. They see the world in relief.
comic, approach to tales out of jail — the personal histories of the prisoners lift us out of Stanville. Kushner deftly underlines causality here, suggesting the ways in which the women’s destinies have been sealed by class and race and neighborhood. Even Romy, a rare-for-prison white girl who skipped the seventh grade (as did her Chicana cellmate), seems to filter her neglected youth, misspent doing drugs in San Francisco’s Sunset District, through her current plight. She draws a fairly straight, fatalistic line from prison back to dropping an acid-and-PCP combo as a pre-teen, wherein she “was convinced the devil was in charge of the future … and that nothing could save us.” Romy also remembers her waitressing job as a teenager this way:
To work at IHOP, you first go to Walmart or a place like it to get work shoes. Where you see, if you didn’t already know, that most of the adult-sized shoes they sell are for working on construction sites or in hospitals, prisons, restaurants, and schools. … Cheap factory knockoffs for people whose choices are to work these crap jobs or crack up and go to a much lower grade of low-grade shoe, made by prison industries.
The difficulty of making connections between individuals, inside and outside of Stanville, is threaded throughout the novel. The character of Gordon Hauser, a well-meaning but personally lost man who lives in a mountain cabin and teaches English at the prison, is juxtaposed with excerpts adapted from Ted Kaczynski’s diary, which one of Hauser’s friends has given him as a joke gift. The parallels Kushner suggests between Hauser and the Unabomber hint that even the teacher’s dogooder liberal mask — he smuggles in art supplies to his students and promises to track down Romy’s son, who is lost in the foster care system — disguises an ugly melancholy and a deep, misanthropic disaffection with society.
The idiosyncrasies of prison life are acutely observed in The Mars Room, and not without humor. Treats like prison wine (“pruno,” made with juice mixed with ketchup packets and fermented with bread) are passed to Romy through the toilet via a plumbing riser. The goodies come from Betty LaFrance, situated a floor below on Death Row, a former leg model for Hanes Her Way pantyhose who hired a hit man to kill her husband and then a hit man to kill the first hit man. Initially obsessed with Betty’s celebrity, Romy convinces her to send a notorious photo — of Betty lying naked under the pile of money she inherited from her murdered husband — through the toilet. When Romy finally gets to see it, the glamorous image she’s conjured up in her mind is deflated by reality, albeit in Kushner’s surrealist prose: “The image was of a woman lying on a bed stony as a corpse, with an enormous landslide of money crushing her, only her head emerging from the pile. She looked as if a gravel truck had backed up to the bed and slid its multi-ton load over her, entombing her in money.”
Glimmers of redemption appear in the novel, usually via these connections between prisoners, even if they don’t last, eventually defeated or obscured by harsher realities. In the end, what the women have is their shared humanity. Their consciousness is heightened by their confinement. They see the world in relief. As Kaczynski writes of nature, “If a human being has passed through and has left even just a small part of a footprint, you’ll probably notice it.”