The Mars Room

 When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s movies about women in prison were common. Low budget movies rated R, drive-in movie fare. They had titles like Wanda, the Wicked Warden, Caged Heat, and The Big Doll House. If I saw them at all, it was years later when they'd air on late night TV, shower scenes cut of course, in the pre-cable days.
 [a:Rachel Kushner|164139|Rachel Kushner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392737021p2/164139.jpg]'s [b:The Mars Room|36373648|The Mars Room|Rachel Kushner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1524991696l/36373648.SY75.jpg|57520253] is about women in prison but anyone reading it for that kind of thing would be disappointed. It's closer to the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black but unlike that show—and most others these days—it doesn't go on longer than it should, though there are times you wished Kushner had dialed back on what to include.
 This may be a failing on my part, but even after 338 pages I didn't feel I knew the main character, Romy Hall, very well. I knew all about her and what she'd done, but I never got a sense of what drove her, other than her wanting to be with her son, who went from being seven to twelve during the span of the book.
 I just finished reading it minutes ago, though. Some of the larger themes may occur to me as my mind digests what it's taken in. Right now I'm trying to figure out what Hall's inmate number, which you learn in the opening paragraph so this is no spoiler, signifies. The number is W (for woman)314159 which, though it's not referred to anywhere in the book, is Pi, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. Is proportion a major theme? The circular nature of life? Something to think about.

 Sammy and I were sharing a cell in administrative segregation for the next ninety days, the punishment we both got for refusing officers' commands. We were in a six-by-eleven-foot room with a toilet and two concrete beds with plastic mattresses. We talked to each other, and took turns standing at the little window in our door to watch the hallway, otherwise known as Main Street, where, if you were lucky, you could see some other person on ad seg being hustled to the showers in handcuffs with two cops behind her, which is ad seg protocol. We were confined twenty-four hours a day, except for the two times a week that we each got taken down the hall for a shower, and once a week when we were given an hour of yard time in an outdoor cage.
Death row was underneath us, in the same building. The cops call them "grade A." They say it about fifty times a day and probably the prison administration thought it was bad for staff morale to say "death row" over and over.

...My first dabble in it was morphine, a pill that someone else melted in a spoon and helped me inject, a guy named Bill and I hadn't thought much about him or what the drug would be like but the careful way he tied off my arm and found my vein, the way the needle went in, so thin and delicate, the whole experience of this random guy I never saw again shooting me up in an abandoned house was exactly what a young girl dreams love can be...


Two things about Romy Hall that fascinated me were her intelligence and her reality. She was amazingly cognizant about her life and the factors in her life that were dragging her down. She also knew that her childhood's surroundings and neglect were not normal. That someone, anyone, can be reduced to working in a strip club for rent, food, and drugs--with no hope of ever doing anything better, no regard for the future--is an urgent statement about how important it is to receive love and encouragement early on. Romy's San Francisco is one tourists and middle-class people don't see.

The reader knows, at the start, that Romy is in prison, and her story is told in a series of flashbacks. These flashbacks, along with the stories of the other women she meets in prison, form a sobering look at who goes to prison, what happens to people with no money or connections, and the absurd rules and harshness of prison life. There is some humor, though most of it is dark.


This beautifully written novel introduces a smogasbord of issues that are ripe for discussion, involving morality, gender, and class.

Bravo! I recommend it.

Kushner profits at being able to describe humans and human action (and inaction) well. She's not sporadic nor hyperkinetic in the same style of writers such as Bukowski, but provides details in a kind of languid way. An example of this follows from her intro:

Chain Night happens once a week on Thursdays. Once a week the defining moment for sixty women takes place. For some of the sixty, that defining moment happens over and over. For them it is routine. For me it happened only once. I was woken at two a.m. and shackled and counted, Romy Leslie Hall, inmate W314159, and lined up with the others for an all-night ride up the valley. As our bus exited the jail perimeter, I glued myself to the mesh-reinforced window to try to see the world. There wasn’t much to look at. Underpasses and on-ramps, dark, deserted boulevards. No one was on the street. We were passing through a moment in the night so remote that traffic lights had ceased to go from green to red and merely blinked a constant yellow. Another car came alongside. It had no lights. It surged past the bus, a dark thing with demonic energy. There was a girl on my unit in county who got life for nothing but driving. She wasn’t the shooter, she would tell anyone who’d listen. She wasn’t the shooter. All she did was drive the car. That was it. They’d used license plate reader technology. They had it on video surveillance. What they had was an image of the car, at night, moving along a street, first with lights on, then with lights off. If the driver cuts the lights, that is premeditation. If the driver cuts the lights, it’s murder.

The story lulls on from there. An inmate is brought into prison; the reader knows this from the get-go, and learns of her past. Poverty, desperate rushes for resolutions, abuse, addiction, it's all here. In a sense, it's both the ire and stereotypical reactions of prison life contained in this book that makes it semi-good and, at its worst, not more than OK; I missed a lot of the solemnity that can occur in prison.

Still, this is Kushner's book, and it is OK. She writes very well, and that's what saved the book for me.