The author of
The Flamethrowers probes
the plight of women behind bars.
It's 2003, and 29-year-old Romy Leslie Hall is serving two
consecutive life sentences plus six years in a California correctional facility
for killing her stalker. After a hardscrabble coming-of-age in 1980s San
Francisco, Romy now faces a new level of suffering in a place where inmates are
hog-tied and tased and, if pregnant, might be forced to give birth on the
cement floor of a cell.
The Mars Room, the
potent third novel from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner,
is an incendiary examination of flawed justice and the stacked deck of a system
that entraps women who were born into poverty.
Kushner spent years visiting California prisons, even posing
as a criminology student, to gain a deeper understanding. Her real-life
preoccupation has produced a fictional story with multiple narrative threads,
voices, and outlooks. We're introduced to Romy's young son, Jackson, from whom
she's estranged, and to the Mars Room, the strip club where she worked to make
ends meet. We also encounter Gordon, the naïve GED teacher at the
prison; Doc, a crooked cop serving time; and Kurt Kennedy, the disabled veteran
who was Romy's pursuer. For all the characters—and none are heroes—the
question is the same: How can a person with only bad options make good
decisions?
The Mars Room is more than a novel; it's
an investigation, an exercise in empathy, an eyes-wide-open work of art.
