...a gorgeous, contemplative slow ride ... The slow torque of the book embodies the limited range of the imprisoned being multiplied by the infinity of a life sentence. The Mars Room uses a handful of years behind bars as the fixed hub of the present, and Romy’s memories become the spokes ... When the short emotional cables of family and granular physical detail combine, The Mars Room sings ... The cadence of The Mars Room is fluid throughout, as intense as the dense circuitry of The Flamethrowers, just cooler.
Kushner’s portrait of life inside the women’s prison is grainy and persuasive. It’s all here: the lice treatments, the smuggling of contraband in rectums and vaginas, the knifings, the cliques, the boredom, the heinous food ... Kushner smuggles her share of humor into these scenes. Like Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son, a book this novel references, she is on the lookout for bent moments of comic grace ... If these prison scenes have a flaw, it’s that Kushner has clearly done so much research that it weighs her down a bit. It’s as if she feels compelled to report everything she’s learned. The Mars Room is a major novel, a sustained performance, one that broods on several exigent ideas ... The Mars Room moves cautiously and slowly. It prowls rather than races. It is like a muscle car oozing down the side roads of your mind. There are times when you might wish it had more velocity, more torque, yet there are reasons it corners cautiously.
There's very little sunlight, literally and metaphorically, in Kushner's brilliant and devastating The Mars Room ... The Mars Room is a necessarily claustrophobic book, but that's not at all a bad thing. Kushner does a masterful job evoking the isolation and hopelessness intrinsic to a life behind bars; she never resorts to cliché or pathos, but still manages to convey the emotional torture to which prisoners are subjected on an hourly basis ... Kushner doesn't make a false move in her third novel; she writes with an intelligence and a ferocity that sets her apart from most others in her cohort. She's a remarkably original and compassionate author, and The Mars Room is a heartbreaking, true and nearly flawless novel.
Romy, Kushner has created a seductive narrator of tigerish intensity whose only vulnerability is her young son ... Rooted in deeply inquisitive thinking and executed with artistry and edgy wit, Kushner’s dramatic and disquieting novel investigates with verve and compassion societal strictures and how very difficult it is to understand each other and to be truly free.
...[an] expert, often remarkable, and sometimes frustrating novel ... The amount of detail she presents here, some amassed and some imagined, is astonishing ... In The Mars Room, Kushner has written a powerful account of the prison-industrial complex as the complex that it is: byzantine, sprawling, brutal, constructed of channels and links that even its inhabitants cannot see ... The Mars Room seems to sometimes fall into the pitfalls of the social realist novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Characters in the book often come across more strongly as circumstances than as real people ... There’s so much information on the page that the reader cannot hear the characters breathe.
...[a] magnificently hard-boiled novel ... a powerful undertow pulls the reader through the book. I didn’t consume it so much as it consumed me, bite by bite. Part of its traction comes from Kushner’s mastery of mood and place, which in this novel is less flashily intellectual, in the style of Don DeLillo, and more infused with yearning ... In The Flamethrowers, Reno had a way of absorbing the voices speaking around her and passing them on to the reader, and so does Romy ... Kushner doesn’t soft-pedal her character’s crimes, some of which are as cruel as the treatment handed out to them. She’s not a polemical novelist. But while the prison guards berate their charges that they have ended up in this hellhole as a result of their own choices, she summons the indelible image of lives from which all meaningful choices have been erased, one by one.
How does a life derail into disaster? Kushner, in her fiercely brilliant new novel, The Mars Room, targets one way: poverty, powerlessness, and prison ... Kushner presents a dazzling tapestry of contradictory characters, carefully connecting their stories with such astonishing aplomb, we dare not look away ... Kushner’s writing, as always, stuns with its razor’s edge beauty ... Stunning and surreal, The Mars Room takes up big ideas, holding a mirror up to American culture and revealing the tragic truth of a failed justice system, as well as a casual refusal to do enough about it. A crime in itself.
In The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner vaults over any such obstacles to produce one of the greatest novels I have read in years ... richer and deeper, more ambitious in its moral vision ... Kushner has been compared to Don DeLillo, and he is a clear influence – the cool humour, the alert and swerving prose – but Kushner is streets ahead in terms of pacing and the feel for story, and her characters are quickened by a warmth of authorial feeling that is sparse in DeLillo’s work ... Like all great fiction, The Mars Room is by native instinct a carnival of human complexity, emphasising the vast unknowability of human lives against systems and ideologies that would reduce them to manageable binaries ... Kushner has a flair for portraying awful men ... Ultimately, this very great and very American novel is a paean to amor fati, to embracing one’s fate no matter how strange or terrible.
I know this sounds dauntingly grim, but in fact this smart, sharply written, sometimes funny novel sucks you into Romy's world, evoking her reckless past and the claustrophobic present that will also be her future ... While it would be wrong to call The Mars Room an old-fashioned protest novel, it is, like her first two books, political. Lucid but not hectoring, it reminds us that most prisoners' fates have been sealed by poverty and the cruel machinery of a prison industrial complex that incentivizes locking people up without caring what happens to them.
The Mars Room is much smaller in scope than either of its predecessors, and seemingly more modest, with less swagger in the writing. It’s a page turner all the same, and in some ways more affecting than the other books ... Part of Kushner’s achievement here is that she makes this character, for all her shortcomings, so appealing. Romy’s narration darts around in a voice that is tough, cynical, a little defensive at times, but ruthlessly honest and without a trace of self-pity ... It’s one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart, and in its passion for social justice you can finally discern a connection between all three of Kushner’s novels.
How do you write about a place outside of hope? If you’re Ms. Kushner, you do it by focusing on character. The Mars Room presents a gallery of the damned worthy of Dante ... The array of souls gives a spacious, rounded feel to the static setting, and Ms. Kushner’s in-depth portrayal of the patterns of prison life—its paid jobs and adult education classes, its barter economy of shampoo packets and bootleg hooch, its endless downtime punctuated by random cruelties—seems wholly authentic ... None of these threads add up to full stories, exactly. They’re almost-stories, fantasies preordained to dead-end against reality. Romy pursues them with a movingly desperate determination that gradually shades into a profound kind of comprehension of what she has lost and what remains. By the novel’s surprisingly luminous ending, Ms. Kushner has accomplished what feels like a minor miracle—she has brought about a change in Romy where no change seemed possible.
Kushner’s great gift is for the evocation of a scene, a time and place, and the atmosphere this book most frequently conjures is one of pervasive claustrophobia ... For the reader, there’s a familiarity to all this that only adds to the sense of walls closing in—we seem already to know the violence and boredom of the prison routines; the unintentionally comic institutional language; the casual sadism of the guards; the systems for smuggling in contraband; the alliances, power struggles, and racial divides among the inmate population. Most of all, there’s the claustrophobia of the narrative itself: the combination of constant risk and limited possibility, the sickening strain of knowing something bad could happen at any minute and that nothing good ever will.
The Mars Room also has an 'exotic' setting but is more limited in its scope and more visceral in its effect ... Yes, it is a fiction, and some of its devices — such as metafictional references and multiple viewpoints — remind readers of that fictionality, and yet it appears that Kushner wants readers to believe — and feel — that the book is transparent, almost literally true ... Most of the inmates of Stanville admit they are guilty of felonies. I think that Kushner is also guilty — of an aesthetic misdemeanor, earnest sentimentality...Like that American classic of sentimentality Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Mars Room takes its title from a closed space of exploitation, but Kushner’s novel has nothing like the cultural range or moral authority of Stowe’s.
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 ... 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. I never felt those heavy paws in Kushner’s previous, far more dynamic novels.
Kushner’s intellectual gifts are prominent throughout her third novel, which traces the fates of characters delicately treading the line between desperate and hopeful before arriving at a cinematic conclusion ... Part of what the looping structure of The Mars Room accomplishes is an emphasis on all relationships — not only loving and loveless ones, but also those we don’t even realize we’re in. The unintended consequences of every minor act of disrespect, of every little lack of consideration, may well be enormous. Kushner’s greatest achievement in this unique work of brilliance and rigor is to urge us all to take responsibility for the unconscionable state of the world in which we operate blithely every single day.
With The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner cements her place as the most vital and interesting American novelist working today. A brutal, unforgiving, and often grimly funny tour de force of wasted lives, The Mars Room makes most other contemporary fiction seem timid and predictable; in doing so, it reminds us that fiction that startles and abrades is as necessary, or even more necessary, than fiction that comforts and assuages ... In the shadow of The Mars Room, middlebrow literary fiction, with its urbane cosmopolitanism, its careers and affairs and families and houses, seems pale, stuffy drawing-room drama drained of vitality or force. The world of The Mars Room may be grim and hopeless, but it is shot through with an electric vitality and a harsh kind of beauty.
Even though the novel has a nominal plot that follows the shifting fortunes of Romy and her cohort, what makes it so enthralling is its unpredictable succession of interiorities, of the quotidian protocols and observations that define incarcerated life (banal to those within, striking to those without), and of the recollections that these characters lean back on for a sense of full identity. For while much 'happens' in the novel, Kushner’s greatest accomplishment is in showing the reader how one adapts to prison’s chronic eventlessness ... Romy doubts that even a confession...will yield understanding—that such doubt makes sense in the context of her character, as someone who hasn’t been the recipient of generous understanding, only redounds to the novel’s excellence.
As is par for the course given the subject matter, many of the scenes alternate between gritty and sparingly matter-of-fact. Most are painted in such graphic detail that it’s easy to forget the book is actually a work of fiction ... The Mars Room is impeccably researched without ever seeming dry or preachy. In a way, the journalistic-fictional hybrid seems closer to a series of well-styled, fact-based vignettes than a traditional prison novel with a simple story arc and satisfying resolution ... It’s also one author’s insightful demonstration of the ways in which America’s criminal justice system is broken, not just inside this particular prison, but outside as well, in scores of other cities and towns across the country ... The Mars Room does have its flaws. Unfortunately, the ending seems like a random (though weirdly predictable) departure from an otherwise authoritative work. Still, it’s a hiccup surrounded by haunting warnings from all sides.
Like her peers in prison, a vibrant cast of diverse women with gut-wrenching personal histories all their own, Romy has committed a terrible and violent crime. Yet, The Mars Room manages to create an overwhelming sense of empathy in readers, for Romy and the other characters. It is not that Kushner makes excuses for the prisoners or their shocking acts of violence, but she does pull back the curtain of an unjust society that gave these women little life choices, and even fewer chances for justice ... A powerful and exacting examination of class, wealth, race, and the other social constructs and power structures that can define an individual's future from the moment of their birth, The Mars Room is a profound novel that says as much about life inside prison as it does about life outside of it.
Kushner’s subject is her country’s fall from grace. This is not the land of the free; no one has choices and everyone is guilty ...They are all prisoners of circumstance, from the inmates to the officers ('no guard wanted to work in a women’s prison'). Taken over by agricultural machinery and deserted by people, Kushner’s California is 'a man-made hell on earth,' where the water is poisonous and even the air is bad ... . Rich in detail and noisy with voices, The Mars Room is an immersive reading experience, in a tradition of fiction drawing on American social history. Just occasionally it resembles a reporter’s novel, the characters becoming suspiciously sassy mouthpieces. But Kushner’s prose fizzes as dangerously as the electric fence around Stanville, her observations spiky as barbed wire, her humour desert-sky dark. This may not be an enjoyable novel, but it marks you like a tattoo.
...the moral scope of The Mars Room is really too large for it to be considered a prison novel. Through its vividly rendered characters, it asks the reader to ponder bigger questions—Dostoyevskian questions—about the system of justice, the possibility of redemption and even the industrialization of the natural landscape ... Kushner is both tough and darkly funny in writing about her characters’ situations, and she writes not so much for us to empathize with them, but rather to understand them. The Mars Room is a captivating and beautiful novel.
Rachel Kushner’s third, extraordinarily accomplished novel, The Mars Room, glows with the kind of authentic hyper-detail only a good deal of hanging out can capture ... Kushner’s great skill lies in her manipulation of focus. Through the accretion of small detail, she builds a formidably systemic world view, one in which capitalism is both merciless and inescapable ... Her project is to show how those rhythms collide, and what happens to a person when they do. She succeeds beautifully.
Kushner is a hugely compelling prose stylist, switching easily between viewpoints and voices, and seamlessly incorporating narrative flourishes ... Beyond these rhetorical skills, she is a writer who has proven her commitment to the task of situating the political within the personal to demonstrate how one cannot be unstitched from the other ... But no amount of speculative personal history or meticulous research—and her research is vast, providing a fabric of detail and fact so complete that its seams do not show during The Mars Room’s heartbreaking deep dive into the prison-industrial complex—is quite sufficient to dispel the novel’s inherent queasiness ... a novel such as this one raises difficult questions of how privilege determines who gets to tell stories.
This is not the glamorous world of ’70s New York City, but it is just as sharply rendered ... Kushner has set up a character inside a closed system, hemmed in by systems all her life, almost in order to show with clarity that touch, love, mothering, memory can never be fully constrained.
...the moral scope of The Mars Room is really too large for it to be considered a prison novel. Through its vividly rendered characters, it asks the reader to ponder bigger questions—Dostoyevskian questions—about the system of justice, the possibility of redemption and even the industrialization of the natural landscape ... Kushner is both tough and darkly funny in writing about her characters’ situations, and she writes not so much for us to empathize with them, but rather to understand them. The Mars Room is a captivating and beautiful novel.
Ms. Kushner skillfully blends these various plot threads into a seamless nonlinear narrative. The pacing is deliberately slow but not plodding; readers will savor every detail of Ms. Kushner’s descriptive passages, which bring ferocious beauty to even the ugliest surroundings (Steinbeck would approve) ... The details of Romy’s crime are revealed late in the narrative, and by the time readers have the full picture they may very well question whether she should be locked up. On the other hand, they may consider Romy an untrustworthy narrator who deserves her fate. The truth is somewhere in between, a condition all literary fiction fans instinctively understand. Rarely, however, does an author make the point the way Ms. Kushner does, with both elegance and grit. Either way, The Mars Room is this summer’s mandatory highbrow beach read.
Kushner is fluent in the world she’s created; it feels authentic and fully realized. She uses slang (without overdoing it) as prisoners trade favors, make jailhouse hooch, or send ice-cream sandwiches through the plumbing.
But this novel isn’t for the faint of heart. The story is unrelentingly bleak, and Kushner isn’t above the occasional cheap shot. For instance, as soon as you learn about a pet bunny in somebody’s cell, you just know it will meet a horrible end. There are also far too many pages devoted to a cop gone bad as he masturbates in his cell, while not nearly enough on the tender and dignified Serenity Smith, a transgender woman in protective custody the next cell over ... There were solid chunks of this book that were very hard to endure. But The Mars Room is a significant structural and conceptual achievement, and its characters stay with you long after you put the book down. You cannot ask much more from a novel than that.
...no, you don’t already know this story ... the author excels at developing fringe characters and creating vivid time periods ... It’s not a plot-driven page-turner, but The Mars Room is a slow boil that unflinchingly examines issues with the justice system and incarceration in this country ... The situations in the book are horrendous, and often hard and exasperating to read, but, the quiet voice of Romy Hall is smart and the story is laced with dark humor ... Systemic institutionalization is a hard topic to swallow, and the author does a remarkable job of giving it to us without sugar coating, in a way that is important for us to take in.
In her compelling third novel, Rachel Kushner spotlights every detail of prison life. She demonstrates how the system is designed to smother individuality, in its scale...and in its abundance of regulations. This clash between bureaucracy and humanity is brutally felt ... The Mars Room is about contraction, the world shrinking to prison’s razor wire and electric fence perimeter. The author exposes the horrors of life inside only to show that, for some, it’s easier than life outside.
There’s no doubting the novel’s authenticity nor its ambition — the question is, does The Mars Room do justice to its subjects: neglected, powerless and invisible women? ... Kushner writes with an unsparing sense of the absurd, raging against capitalism and poverty, war and industrial farming, racial inequality and gentrification. As a polemic, it’s ferocious and smart. As a work of fiction, it’s clumsy and unsatisfying, zigzagging manically — as if Kushner wrote it while needing the loo.
Romy is either an enigma or a character who doesn’t quite cohere. The 29-year-old German-American stripper, trapped in her station in life, who drives a 1963 Chevy Impala and likes talking about rims and spinners, dates an art-school professor, has a Disneyfied kid who makes cute observations about the autumn leaves, and who has also bludgeoned a man to death, is not someone whose motives are always discernible. When Romy speaks of ‘an elevator that smelled of human sweat ionising on stainless steel’, I’m not sure she is staying in character. And Kushner deploys the trick of humanizing Romy for readers by making her too someone who likes to read. There are several unnecessary attempts to persuade us not only that Romy is smart, but also that the terms by which we might judge smarts (a salaried job, degrees) are mistaken ... In scenes of daily prison life, the book starts to read like an updated all-female Shawshank Redemption. There are many poignant attempts to restore humanity to the soulless institution, all of them informed by Kushner’s research ... So many journalistic details! There are times when it feels as if the novel was written more to accommodate each of them than to tell a particular story ... What Kushner has done, in The Mars Room, is novelize certain arguments of the Abolish Prisons movement ... I’m not sure, however, that her novel will emerge in the years to come as a primary artistic document about this national problem. The Mars Room isn’t exactly a work of social realism; neither is it a protest novel ... It is too ambivalent to work as a polemic, and seems instead destined to join the collective prison-based entertainment pile: television shows and movies that, as Davis once wrote, serve as much to normalize the abnormal prison system as reveal the damage it has wrought.
In Rachel Kushner’s new novel, The Mars Room, the narrator Romy Hall feels fully inhabited ... Like Kushner, she grew up in the Sunset, then a tough, forgotten, working-class San Francisco neighborhood. You get the feeling Kushner believes that Romy’s story, but for a few twists of fate, could have been her own—instead of a critically acclaimed writer whose first two novels where nominated for the National Book Award, she might have been a stripper and single mother serving two consecutive life sentences for bludgeoning a stalker to death ... quotidian struggles are what give The Mars Room so much life. The women are endlessly creative and full of gallows humor ... In The Mars Room, Kushner transmits her empathy for Romy so effectively that we, too, are Romy. We should and do care for her, along with all of the other incarcerated women.
Rachel Kushner’s writing has been called 'propulsive,' and this was definitely on show ... This heartbreaking, frustrating and beautiful book gave me a pit in my stomach that didn’t go away once I finished reading.
...a heartbreaking and unforgettable novel ... Kushner’s novel is notable for its holistic depiction of who gets wrapped up in incarceration—families, lawyers, police, and prisoners; it deserves to be read with the same level of pathos, love, and humanity with which it clearly was written.
This is, fundamentally, a novel about poverty and how our structures of power do not work for the poor, and Kushner does not flinch. If the novel lags a bit in the long sections of backstory, it’s because the honest depiction of prison life is so gripping. An unforgiving look at a brutal system.
