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Wednesday, August 22, 2018

Review of THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner

3.5 Stars 
I kept coming across this title on lists of recommended reads and then found it on the longlist for the 2018 Booker Prize, so I opted to read it though I’m not a fan of Orange is the New Black or prison novels in general.

Set in a women’s correctional facility in central California, the book focuses on one of the inmates, Romy Hall, who is serving two consecutive life sentences for killing a man who stalked her.  Through flashbacks, we learn about her neglectful childhood, the sexual and physical abuse she suffered, her job as a sex worker, and her drug addiction.  We also meet some of her fellow inmates:  a woman who killed her own child, a wisecracking trans woman, a former panty hose model on death row.  Two male characters receive some attention:  Gordon Hauser, a teacher who takes an interest in Romy, and Doc, a sociopathic “dirty cop”. 

There is no traditional plot.  The book is a series of vignettes which shift in focus and point of view to tell the stories of various women:  their early lives and their lives in prison.  The realities of life in prison include punitive rules, inedible food, squabbles between cliques, and unrelenting boredom.  Everyone engages in smuggling and manipulation to try and make life more bearable. 

The author emphasizes that socioeconomic factors directly affect the probability of incarceration.  Each of the women had limited options from birth and almost all were victims of poverty, rape, abuse, and exploitation; Gordon realizes that a person born in poor districts “might be trained from birth practically to represent your block, your gang, to rep hard, to have pride, to be hard.  Maybe you had a lot of siblings to watch and possibly you knew almost nobody who had finished school, or worked a stable job.  People from your family were in prison, whole swaths of your community, and it was part of life to eventually go there.  So, you were born fucked.”   Romy makes much the same point addressing the reader directly:  “You would not have been wandering lost at midnight at age eleven.  You would have been safe and dry and asleep, at home with your mother and your father who cared about you and had rules, curfews, expectations.  Everything for you would have been different.  But if you were me, you would have done what I did.”  The women committed crimes of violence but Gordon points out that “there were more abstract forms [of violence], depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools.” 

Once arrested, the women become victims of the justice system.  Incompetent and overworked public defenders fail them.  In Romy’s case, for example, the extenuating circumstances of her crime are never mentioned in court.  Once in prison, they are provided counselors:  “Counselor doesn’t mean someone who counsels.  Your prison counselor determines your security classification and when and if you get mainlined to general population.  Your counselor keeps tabs on you and reports to the parole board, if you are headed for parole.”    Romy’s counselor doesn’t help her find out what has happened to her son; instead, she says “’Ms. Hall, I know it’s tough, but your situation is due one hundred percent to choices you made and actions you took.’”  What purpose does learning “excellent on-the job training skills, which would translate into employment upon release” have when a prisoner has no release date?  And serving long-term sentences seems useless, as Gordon observes:  “Gordon could not see that making them suffer lifelong would accrue to justice.  It added new harm to old.” 

The book is not really an enjoyable read.  It tends to be unfailingly bleak since the women had few choices early in their lives and now have little hope.  The disjointed structure makes it difficult to connect with the characters though surely the author wants the reader to do so since her point is that though their existence is such that one may think of them as aliens on Mars, the women are very much products of our world.  The didactic tone is also annoying; Gordon, for instance, often seems not much more than a mouthpiece for the author. 

The book is a strong indictment of the American justice and penal systems and of society as a whole.  It is not, however, worthy of the Booker Prize for fiction because it often reads more like a work of non-fiction.  Apparently, the author did extensive research for the book and it shows, but I prefer my novels to be both thought-provoking and entertaining. 

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