When Rachel Kushner wrote her 2017 book “The Mars Room,” she said that she wanted to create a life full of the people that “the state of California rendered invisible to others.” In a novel full of incarceration, surveillance and grit, “The Mars Room” shines a light on these institutionally oppressed communities. Timelessly, women are marginalized at the expense of the criminal justice system — failing to receive justice as survivors of sexual assault or domestic violence. Kushner illustrates the discrimination and abuse that women receive on the penal side of the criminal justice system.
“The Mars Room” tells the story of Romy Hall — a 28-year-old woman from San Francisco with a sharp tongue and two consecutive life sentences. She does her time in a women’s prison buried in the central valley of California: Stanville Correctional Facility.
Stanville is based off of Central California Women’s Facility (often nicknamed after the town in which it’s located, Chowchilla), the largest women’s prison in the world.
In Chowchilla, Kushner shadowed several of the inmates and guards back in 2014, who eventually became thinly veiled adaptations in “The Mars Room.” Kushner’s research comes to fruition in the brilliant emotional delivery of each character, though she throws them together in a scattered narrative timeline. Take, for example, Doc, the sweetly spineless guard who perpetually breaks prison guidelines for the sake of the inmates he falls in a sympathetic love with; Conan, a fellow inmate and black trans man; and Gordon Hauser, a unabomber-obsessed grad school dropout who teaches elementary curriculum in the prison. Kushner tells a bit of their respective narratives, meanwhile peppering in excerpts from Ted Kaczynski’s diary, showing Hauser’s chilling contemplation and comparison between Kaczynski and Henry David Thoreau.
The narration frequently flashes back to life before Stanville, when Romy Hall was on the low-income fringes of San Francisco and the grimy underground sex and drug trafficking scenes. Kushner paints vivid pictures of 10-year-olds experimenting with drugs, close friends of Romy’s as victims of sex trafficking and the lowbrow strip club where she works and where the book got its name. Kushner analyzes the harsh realities of the adult entertainment industry and the vulnerabilities of the workers themselves. She tells the story of the creepy customer who ultimately stalks Romy and finds himself murdered on her front porch.
While Kushner’s works have always been political, “The Mars Room” is a shift from her standard historical fiction, analyzing contemporary politics of sex work and mass incarceration. Kushner utilizes a sort of Marxist-feminist lens, pointing out socioeconomic factors affecting the rate of incarceration of women. The nature of this incarceration is hidden, too, as much of the discrimination of marginalized groups often is. In reality, the number of incarcerated women has quadrupled over the last 20 years, with little to no open discussion. In “The Mars Room,” Kushner opens up a conversation about these purposefully repressed communities and discourses.
The sexist and classist imbalances that Kushner includes in her third novel maintain a disheartening relevance with the increased incarceration of women, the #metoo movement and the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Her literary representation of the marginalized brings an essential voice to those living on the fringes.
