Powerful novel about female incarceration in America. The background stories of these women, and of Romy Hall in particular, are fascinating and horrifying - told thoughtfully with dark humour and care.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

For the most part, this book was a brilliant, layered, dark, raw, intimate investigation into the lives of women in the industrial prison complex in the United States, offering glimpses into how they got there and how they survive knowing their lives are forever bound by the walls of captivity. The ending does not quite work, but nonetheless this is one of the better works of fiction I have read in 2018 and made me appreciate Kushner after being underwhelmed by her previous novel, Flamethrowers.

The new season of Orange is the New Black recently hit Netflix - The Mars Room gave me just enough to satisfy my female inmates story craving to tide me over until the release... and for all of you who are fans of the series and already binged through the season, you should pick up this book.

I think you can imagine the concept of this book by reading the summary. Therefore, I am going to write my review on the style of this book. I felt like it reads a little bit like slam poetry. It’s a book that you almost want to read out loud, because it sounds like music when you read it. The prose is therefore poetic, and it adds so much emotion and intensity to this story. It’s a book you want to read slowly to savour the stories within, and the emotional aura within the pages will make you tear up. I’d say this is a slow paced book, so if you’re looking for a quick story, I would skip it.

I have to admit that I found that it ended too abruptly. I understand that there's only so much one can do with someone convicted of a life sentence, but I wish the final chapters had been followed up by a few more.

I'd like to thank Simon & Schuster Canada, as well as Netgalley, for the free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I would recommend this book.

Prison chic is a thing, but I wouldn’t really look at Rachel Kushner’s new novel The Mars Room as glamourous. Like Curtis Dawkins’ short story collection The Graybar Hotel, this novel looks at the absurdities of prison life. It’s much more than that, though. It’s a deep novel about the socioeconomic system of injustice that puts certain people behind bars. It’s a very liberal book, one that might not sit well with some people, but it captures the real reasons why some are destined for prison and the utter meaninglessness of one’s life when one is placed in a cage, perhaps literally.

The story involves a woman named Romy Hall, who — when we met her at the start of the book — is slated to serve two consecutive life sentences for killing a veteran. Her parole hearing is in 37 years, and if she convinces the board that she has reformed, she will then start serving her second life sentence — in a Kafka-esque twist of absurdity. In a previous life, she was a stripper in a very dead-end peeler bar, and she has a son named Jackson who lives with her mother. However, about halfway through the book and for reasons I won’t spoil, Jackson can no longer live with Romy’s mother. Thus, The Mars Room asks the question: can you be a parent even though your rights to your own child have been terminated? In a much broader way, the novel asks if you can even be remotely human when you’re behind bars.

I try not to see other reviews in penning my own, but have stumbled across a few write-ups that accuse The Mars Room for being a largely plotless novel. I think this criticism misses the point. When you’re in jail (not that I would know from personal experience), all you have are the shards of a past life. These are stories that some may be willing to pass on to others to remind oneself that they had a life beyond an institutional setting. When you’re facing the prospect of dying in jail, memories are all you have — so the novel is largely stories and flashbacks to earlier times. Beyond that, there’s not really much point except to go through the motions and simply get through one day.

We learn that, in a sense, Romy was destined for jail having led a life that was pointless and chaotic growing up. Her parents were largely absent. She picks friends with drug abusers. She finishes high school by the skin of her teeth. From there, though, there are no avenues to a higher education due to a scarcity of funds. Romy’s life is one big cul de sac from the moment she’s born. The novel exposes the social injustice of communities that exist solely to populate prisons — and maybe that is so because there are certain types of people that society would rather see locked up and forgotten about: minority groups, transgendered peoples, and so on.

However, The Mars Room offers an inadvertent nod to the #MeToo movement. We know that Romy’s victim is a man who was stalking her relentlessly, but how relentless isn’t unveiled until the end of the novel. The question is raised that, for a woman of limited means and faced with a situation that is, at best, uncomfortable and, at worst, life threatening, what course of action did she really have at her disposal? Would society be ready to believe the story of a stripper versus the story of someone who served in the military? Would society side with the woman of (arguably) low status versus a person who has a much higher standing, and is, also, a man? We’ve seen these sorts of questions arise in recent court cases, and The Mars Room is a mirror that reflects the larger zeitgeist.

The book also exceptionally captures just how boring prison can be — and this explains why there is not much plot in the book. Other than escape, what else can Romy do? All she can do is find jobs in the prison to feel meaningful while avoiding the obvious politics between prisoners and guards alike. The only escapism is when a male teacher takes a shine to her and begins ordering books from Amazon for her to read. That’s it. That’s all she has beyond working in a woodworking shop that is normally off limits to convicts without release dates, but accepts her only for the reason that there is a demand for extra workers.

Where The Mars Room falls flat is that it somehow ties in the diaries of the Unabomber into the narrative. This doesn’t have much to do with the book, though it may be an attempt to further delve into the criminal mind. Also, in presumably an effort to pad out the pages, we get chapters from the points of view of male secondary characters that really don’t add too much to the overall story — except, perhaps, as a counterpoint to show how much better male inmates and correctional workers have it, while women in the correctional system are at the bottom of the proverbial totem pole (the only people below women, it seems, are the trangendered inmates who don’t fit in in prisons belonging to either sex).

Kushner, though, is a skilled writer — her previous two books were nominated for the U.S. National Book Award. When she’s on point, she’s basically on point. The Mars Room gives you a lot to think about, right from the very title of the book. (I found it apropos that the book is named after the strip club Romy worked at, which is a prison in its own right.) It should be noted that this book is also set in San Francisco and its environs, so this gives the city a colouring that goes beyond the sparkle and shine of the recent gentrification of the city by Silicon Valley workers. There’s a lot to chew on here. Though it lapses into stories that don’t really have much to do with the broader picture, or so it would seem, The Mars Room is exceptionally well written and will make you think about how society is structured so that the losers will always lose. Flip through these pages. They’ll give you much to think about.

https://booknormblog.com/2018/05/14/book-review-the-mars-room-by-rachel-kushner-a-harrowing-novel-of-life-in-prison/

BOOKWORM NORM

book reviews, opinions and fun by Norm Sigurdson

POSTED ONMAY 14, 2018 BY NORM SIGURDSON

Book Review – The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner – A Harrowing Novel of Life in Prison

Rachel Kushner’s two previous novels, both of which were finalists for the National Book Award, relied heavily on research, which she used skillfully to give her novels an air of authority. Telex From Cuba (2008) centred on a group of Americans in Cuba on the brink of the Castro revolution in the 1950s and The Flamethrowers (2013) was a vivid recreation of the New York art scene of the 1970s.

In her third novel, The Mars Room, Kushner is closer to the present. The time is mostly the late 1990s and the early years of the 2000s. The novel’s main setting is an enormous women’s prison in California, a world few people have intimate knowledge of. As Kushner said in a recent New Yorker profile, she made dozens of visits to Chowchilla Prison (the largest women’s prison in the world) and befriended many inmates and ex-inmates to make sure that her novel reflected their reality.

This approach has many benefits but many perils as well. There are long passages in the book where I found myself bogged down by the details of prison life. There were times when Kushner’s extensive research became so foregrounded that the novel felt more like non-fiction than a novel. This is particularly the case in the backstories for some of the minor characters — paradoxically, many of them felt less “real” to me as as characters by feeling more “real” as specific stories.

Having said that, Kushner’s obvious sympathy for and empathy with her characters and her anger at the inhuman carceral system that they have become caught up in makes The Mars Room an emotional and compulsive reading experience that does force readers to confront human beings that our society wants us to forget or ignore.

The novel opens with a “Chain Night,” where a busload of 60 shackled women prisoners are being transported by bus in the dead of night from the county jail in Los Angeles to Stanville women’s prison where they will serve their sentences, often life sentences. One of the prisoners is Romy Hall, sentenced to serve the unbelievable term of two consecutive life sentences plus six years.

“They were moving us at that hour for a reason,” Romy tells us, “for many reasons. If they could have shot us to the prison in a capsule they would have. Anything to shield the regular people from having to look at us, a crew of cuffed and chained women on a sheriff’s department bus.”

The prison, which houses thousands of women, is in a remote part of California, difficult to access, especially for poor people with no reliable transportation or money for gas, food or a motel along the way. So, most inmates rarely get visitors. They can’t access the internet or phone anyone who doesn’t already have an approved prison services phone app.
The utter abandonment of the Stanville inmates in this complex, closed and openly hostile eco-system is one of the novel’s strongest elements. The novel moves at a slow pace between the regimented life in the prison to flashbacks of life in “the free world.

Romy, like many of the inmates, seems almost pre-programmed to have been destined for prison. She grew up poor in San Francisco with an inattentive single mother and got into drugs and petty crime early. “It grabbed me by the back of the head with its firm clench,” she says of her first experience of heroin, “rubber tongs, then warmth spread down through me. I broke into the most relaxing sweat of my life. I fell in love. I don’t miss those years. I’m just telling you.”

She is clearly intelligent but didn’t find a traditional career path. Instead, she wound up as a lap dancer at The Mars Room, a sleazy strip club on San Francisco’s Market Street. The Mars Room is “definitely the worst and most notorious, the very seediest and most circuslike place there is,” says Romy looking back. “If you’d showered you had a competitive edge at the Mars Room. If your tattoos weren’t misspelled you were hot property. If you weren’t five or six months pregnant, you were the it-girl in the club that night.”

Romy has a son, Jackson, who is five when she is arrested and is in her mother’s care. But when her mother dies while Romy is at Stanville he gets swallowed up in the foster care system and Romy is not allowed to know what has happened to him, losing the one thing that gave her hope, “the grain of reality in the centre of my thoughts.”

In her desperation she turns for help to Gordon Hauser, a failed PhD student who takes a job teaching GED at the prison, living in a one-room cabin nearby. Gordon is the only character in the book who is a part of life at Stanville but can go home at night.

He is a complex and well-drawn character. He means well but is naive and overly needy. He is also lonely and depressed (and reading more Ted Kaczynski than Henry Thoreau, his supposed dissertation subject). He is attracted to Romy but doesn’t realize how much she is, out of necessity, manipulating him.

Romy, like most of the other women in the prison is guilty. She killed her stalker in circumstances that could be construed as self-defence, but was given a pathetic defence by a harried and incompetent public defender.
Near the end of the book Gordon muses about on of his students, Button Sanchez, a youth offender doing life:

“The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez. In the primitive part of the mind, violence was body-to-body, punching and clubbing and cutting. Those people went to prison. Were not offered any kind of mercy.”

That sums up the message of this harrowing, sad and at times brilliant book. It also highlights the novel’s occasional fault of being overly didactic. 

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, Scribner 338pp.

I wanted to love this book so bad, it started out decently well, but as you go on it becomes confusing and hard to follow. I unfortunately was unable to finish it. It had a promising story line with decently good characters, but the writing style made it hard to read

I'm two-thirds of the way through, and thinking this book might be the new Great American Novel. It's about a women's prison in California, where Romy Hall is serving two consecutive life sentences for killing her stalker. It's both sweeping - encompassing the stories of several people both in and out of prison - and intimate, concerned with the minutiae of prison life and the intricacies of Romy's inner world. Ultimately, it's shaping up to be a potent condemnation of the mass incarceration of people with few resources.

Absolutely stunning. Kushner gets better and better with each book. The Flamethrowers was excellent, but this story fits together even more and challenges the reader’s view at every turn. The style is stunning. Rachel has a distinctive feel for the rhythms of language and uses it perfectly in this book.
For me this book was a great read which kept me hooked right through the book. I would like to thank NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book.

What is justice? What is fair? Makes you question...is justice always fair? Very interesting read, so much is revealed on what goes on behind prison walls.... Recommended to the Orange is the new Black and Wentworth fans!

hard to follow. I wanted to really enjoy this book. but had a hard time following the story line. This is a miss for this author. :(

I couldn't finish this book. The premise was interesting but the way the story lines jumped to so many characters and I couldn't see how the title really linked to the overall novel beyond being a place where one character worked. I was expecting a story about a women sent to prison unfairly and how she dealt with it but instead we get the POV and stories of so many characters and I guess their stories intertwine but I couldn't even read far enough along to see that. It was much too disjointed for me. a DNF

This book is all about a fictional prison system and the underbelly of what goes on behind bars to the inmates. The book tell the story of our main character as she get put in prison. She tells all about her experience both inside the cells along with how she got there in the first place by selling her body. I was quite excited to read this book because it has the description of a book that I get quite into yelling at how wrong things are, however I had a hard time getting into this one. I found the characters hard to relate to in this story and I found them hard to get behind. I'm not sure why that is however. Pretty good story line but I wasn't a fan of the execution. What I did like however was it showed prison in all of its squalor . There was no special light no cutesy inmates it showed how hard that it would be no sugar coating. While there were some really good parts like some of the stories of how the inmates got into the prison, I felt that the rest of the novel just didn't hold my interest like I expected it to in the beginning.

I was really looking forward to this book, I just enjoyed "Telex From Cuba" so much. Rachel Kushner is a great writer, and she knows how to tell a story.

And this is a great book! It has well-developed characters. A tough economic situation we should all know/care more about. Believable plot (unfortunately). And I understand it's been quite well researched.

But, in hindsight, for me, I think, the timing is unfortunate. After watching every season of "Orange is the New Black," I'm not entirely sure I have any businesses reading a prison book right now. When I was reading this book, I'm not sure if my brain was picturing the prison based on Rachel Kushner's (great) writing, or based on what I've seen on TV. I can't be sure my head wasn't overriding Kushner's text with my own imagination, based on OITNB. Of course, this "complaint" has nothing to do with Rachel Kushner — it speaks more to the fact that OITNB has built a very strong world.

Rachel Kushner: please go back to Cuba!

Thanks to NetGalley for a review copy of this book.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Simon and Schuster for an advance copy of this book in return for a fair and honest review. I thought I would be among the intended audience for The Mars Room, having read both fictional and non-fictional books about prison life I have watched all the Orange is the New Black series and thought it was just OK, but my favourite all time TV shows were the much darker, grittier Wentworth (life inside an Australian women's prison) and OZ ( inside a mens' prison).

I really made an effort with this book, but was unable to find any connection. It took much persistence and determination on my part to read to the ending. I was not feeling any of those emotions; neither sympathy, sorrow, anger, suspense,or any other connection which keeps one invested and turning the pages. The story points out the inequality in legal treatment for the poor as opposed to people who can afford skilled representation in the courts. This results in harsher sentences for the impoverished which is an important point.

I didn't care for its narrative style, but feel it may appeal to some readers. Its organization was disjointed, with choppy chapters switching from first to third persons in a rambling, disconnected manner, and to various timelines.
The main character, Romy, seemed cold and aloof, except for her grief in losing her young son. Although she is serving two life sentences and lacking in hope her narration seemed to be coming from some distance. It bothered me as i knew I should be feeling empathy but failed to do so.
I would have liked to have learned more about the assorted women prisoners. Just when the characters were becoming interesting their stories were abruptly cut off. More focus on the lives of the women, and less time on Doc, a corrupt cop in a mens' prison would have been beneficial. At first there was some confusion with names. Characters were sometimes referred to by only their first or their last name, or their real names before entering prison.
I have seen some high praise by readers, so don't want to influence anyone with my negative review. Some seem to have liked it a lot.

Transphobic. Absolutely disgusting.

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room is an atmospheric story that tells us about Romy Hall, who has just been transferred to her new home, Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, to serve out two consecutive life sentences. The novel jumps around a bit, but this allows us to delve into a lot of different threads of Romy's life, including her time growing up in San Francisco, her life as a single mother to Jackson, and, eventually, why she was sent to Stanville. We are also treated to insights regarding the lives of the other inmates at Stanville and others connected to Romy, such as a teacher in the facility. We also learn of the various faults in the system, including the overworked and under skilled public defender who fails Romy and the prison guards who see the inmates only in terms of their guilt and deserved suffering. Some of the storylines aren't directly related to Romy (Doc, a male inmate at another prison) and excerpts from writing by Thoreau and Kaczynski, but serve as a nice contrast to Romy and her crime.

Kushner gives us a sympathetic portrayal of Romy. Although we know that she is guilty of murdering her stalker, the reader cannot help but to feel sad for her plight and my heart broke for her repeatedly, starting with a night when she is left downtown without and money to find her way home. This was a powerful book that was beautifully written; I fell in love with Kushner's prose and I cannot wait to read something else written by her.