Author Rachel Kushner takes a look at life behind bars.
Author Rachel Kushner looks at life behind bars with gallows humor
How does a young woman sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole make sense of her fate? Do memories of her former life in the “free world” provide mental sustenance or only exacerbate the pain of incarceration? What becomes of her individuality, not to mention her humanity, even her soul?
These are central questions Rachel Kushner explores in her new novel, “The Mars Room.” When the story begins, 29-year-old Romy Hall is on a sheriff ’s bus to Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility in California’s Central Valley. She’s smart, tough and astute about people’s idiosyncratic weaknesses. Her own destiny con-
founds her at the same time that it seems preordained by poverty and neglect.
Romy is also, like Kushner, from San Francisco, and her prison experience is punctuated with colorful flashbacks to her untethered, drugfueled adolescence in a city that is stifling and grimy — “not about rainbow flags or Beat poetry or steep crooked streets but fog and Irish bars and liquor stores all the way to the Great Highway.”
In “The Mars Room,” Kushner, an exceptionally talented and philosophically minded writer, manages to offset her historical critiques of “bourgeois capitalist society” and California’s “1970s prison-building boom” with gallows humor about life behind bars. She is the only author to have first and second novels, “Telex From Cuba” (2008) and “The Flamethrowers” (2013), both nominated for the National Book Award.
Kushner, 49, lives in Los Angeles. On a recent visit to San Francisco, she spoke to The Chronicle about writing a novel of big, consequential ideas that’s set in the most confined of spaces.
Q: What prompted you to write a novel set in a prison? You said in a New Yorker interview that you started researching women’s incarceration back in 2012 because you “felt it was necessary.” Why was it imperative? A: The idea had been brewing for a long time. Without trying to sound like I’m unusually attuned to justice or injustice, because I’m not, I think it’s bothered me since I was quite young that this is how we deal with a portion of society.
The book raises questions that allowed me to think carefully into issues that felt very high stakes, morally — about innocence, justice, destiny. I don’t feel like I’d ever done that before with my fiction, and I went through a maturation process by having to do it.
Also, I’d known a couple people growing up who ended up in prison. One got out after serving a very long sentence, and then died of a drug overdose from an addiction he contracted while in prison. I think that always haunted me, that people have different so-called destinies.
Q: Were you thinking of anyone in particular when writing Romy? A: Not her exact circumstances and story, but the type of girl she is, yes. I knew many, many people who are like her and her friend Eva. Those were my friends. She’s very familiar to me.
Q: Was it challenging writing about lives that are so confined physically?
A: It’s definitely a challenge to bring in humor and vitality. So I was looking at it as a kind of formal enterprise in that way, because it has to be funny, and it has to be alive. Prison is grim, and people would rather not be there, but once they are, it becomes the extended limit of their universe, and an entire new humanity is contained there.
I thought a person in that situation would probably live to a fairly large degree inside of her thoughts and fantasies. She would have to review and hold onto the memories generated as a person who was once free.
Q: Romy describes San Francisco as cursed, its beauty on display for tourists, not natives. It’s a bleaker picture of the city than most writers portray. Were you drawing on your own
childhood and observations?
A: I don’t want to dis San Francisco. I love it, in a way, but as a kid in the Sunset during a cold summer, if you’re not from a family that has programmed your summer, there’s nothing to do. It’s cold, and we would just get up and put on a big jacket and go drink in the park. That’s how we spent our days. I guess there is a bleakness that people don’t talk about, that doesn’t fit with the portrait of it being a beautiful, sparkly place.
Q: You also evoke the city before the tech boom, before, as Romy says, “everything got converted by money.” Are you nostalgic?
A: It’s not nostalgia. I’m not interested in harping on gentrification or the tech industry. It’s just more marveling over what was, and is no longer. It becomes the job of the writer to try to conjure these things back into existence, if only for a moment or on a page.
Q: Were any writers helpful to you who’ve also wrestled with justice and punishment?
A: Dostoevsky and Nietzsche were the two people who I could talk to about what was going on.
Don DeLillo has been a mentor to me. He actually came up with the idea to title the book “The Mars Room.” I didn’t think of it because to me it only indicated this seedy club on Market Street, but he saw it’s more about these two words. “Mars” is the god of war and a far-away planet, and “room” is this small, confined space. There’s an interesting tension. Then my husband looked it up and found that the only existing Mars Room is in the Palace of Versailles. It has incredibly violent frescoes on the walls and ceiling. So, why not?