Like despair? You’ll love “Mars Room”

FICTION

More than a week before the May 1 release of Rachel Kushner’s new novel, “The Mars Room,” the New York Times published an excerpt in a special 12-page section. Hauntingly illustrated and spiced with artsy pull-quotes, it was an extraordinary presentation designed to proclaim the advent of an extraordinary book. Indeed, a Times book critic followed up with a review calling “The Mars Room” “a major novel.”

Which may be the problem with this bleak tale about people trapped in the American prison system. “The Mars Room” shuffles along shackled with so much Importance that it barely has room to move. Swollen with certainty, the story tolerates little ambiguity and offers few surprises. Kushner told the New Yorker that several years ago she decided “to learn everything I could about California prisons.” And now she is determined to teach it to us, her readers, who are sentenced to more than 300 pages of despair, cruelty and illness.

The heroine is Romy Hall, a 29-year-old white woman who has just begun serving two consecutive life sentences plus six years for murdering a stalker. “I don’t plan on living a long life,” she tells us, “or a short life, necessarily. I have no plans at all. The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless. But not having plans doesn’t mean I don’t have regrets.”

As you might gather from that existential reflection, Romy is better educated than her cellmates, who are a handy assortment of the poor, desperate and deranged. The mother of a little boy, Romy was a lap dancer at the Mars Room in San Francisco, “the worst and most notorious, the very seediest and most circuslike place there is.”

Romy’s new comrades at the Stanville women’s prison in California include Button Sanchez, who gives birth while being admitted. And there’s Conan, who looks so masculine that she was once accidentally housed in a prison for men. Laura Lipp, a chatty woman who murdered her own child, asks Romy, “Do you know who Medea is?” And Betty Lafrance had been a leg model for Hanes pantyhose, but now makes her own vomit-smelling hooch from juice and ketchup. “Don’t forget to decant,” she advises. “It’s got to breathe.”

If you’ve seen a few episodes of “Orange Is the New Black,” you’ll recognize the structure here. Romy has no chance of getting out, but she’s frantic to make some kind of contact with her little boy, a struggle that provides a faint overarching storyline. But constrained by the prison setting, the plot mostly relies on shifts in focus and point of view to create movement. Kushner cycles through the women’s tragic stories, mingling horrific anecdotes from before they were incarcerated with grim events in prison. The result is a terrifying survey of what it means to be poor and female in the United States.

There’s something so calculated about “The Mars Room” that even the most progressive readers are bound to feel like they’re being marched down a narrow hallway.

It is only in the novel’s surprisingly poetic ending that Romy finally experiences a kind of insight beyond her capacity to articulate. In these rare spaces, we’re allowed the freedom to choose how we feel, to escape this novel’s thematic bars and experience something closer to art than instruction.