On Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room 

by Jamie Levy 

Beginning on a bus driving down the Central Valley, The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner focuses in on the lives prisoners and the individuals connected to prisons. In this scene, Romy, one of the main characters on the novel, is being transferred from Los Angeles to Smallville Prison which is placed amongst almond groves in the Central Valley. She is sat next to the only other white woman on the bus, Laura Lipp, and is forced to listen to her spewing facts about her past, before she too was a prisoner. Throughout the scene, Kushner weaves recollections from Romy’s life before she was convicted, her childhood in the Sunset District in San Francisco leading up to her job at the Mars Room, a low level strip club where ‘girls who worked the audience in the standard uniform of lace bra and panties by with ratty broken-down tennis shoes’ (Kushner 25). In these recollections, it is apparent that Romy believes that all the events that happened to her prior to her conviction, a creepy older man in the Tenderloin asking her to go to his hotel room, neglective mother, and her stalker Creepy Kennedy, all brought her to the current moment, a bus migrating up the Central Valley, transferring prisons.

 Immediately, Kushner grips the reader with her deft descriptions and characterizations of each individual in the bus and later at the prison itself. Her prose allows the reader reflect on each character not based on the moral decisions made to get to the point they are, in prison, but to empathize with each logical decision made in each of their circumstances. Kushner situates the reader in an intense sense of place in her language around Romy’s view of San Francisco, conveying in the best way possible Romy’s distaste for the city as well as its prominence in her past: ‘the city to us was clammy fingers of fog working their way into our clothes, always those clammy fingers, and big bluffs of wet mist hurling themselves down Judah Street.’

Additionally, Kushner uses her bleak yet full language to describe the body, specifically the female body’s, biological resistance to prison and the guards incapabilities of dealing with this resistance. On the long bus ride to Smallville, Romy notices a large overweight inmate slumped over in a way in which she was not alive. The woman slide to the floor, obviously unconscious, and the guards look at her knowing her state of being, but wait hours until they arrive at the destination to figure out how to deal with the body. In this, all the woman on the bus are confined to this space in which the body physically resists in everyday. When Romy and the rest of the woman get to the Smallville surrounded by nothingness, they are all forced to wash themselves with chemical soap to kill at possible bugs on their bodies. Romy tells a young pregnant woman next to her to not do comply, because when she had to was herself with the same chemicals before after an outbreak at the Mars Room, Romy got her period within hours. But, the pregnant girl was forced to wash her body, and gave birth inside of the prison within hours. This resistant to the institution of prison and the protocols the surround it, is Kushner’s brilliant weaving of asking the reader to question prison as a facade of society itself.

   As Kushner has publicly denounced the prison system, calling for the abolishment of the institution itself, her ideas do not forcefully dictate in anyway the actions or the feelings of the characters within The Mars Room. Her personal ideals are clearly separate in the fact that Kushner’s research is fluidly brought throughout the novel and is expertly intertwined with the development of the character’s such as Romy, Conan, and Laura Lipp. Kushner’s ideals and thoughts on imprisonment come through in the thoughts and ideals of the characters she forms, but in a way in which we are trained by the writing to believe that those are things in which these characters would believe to be true. The Mars Room remains one the most brilliantly writing novels thus far of 2018, and will continue to be relevant to the issues that prison as an institution faces, particularly the incarceration of women.