The Mars Room.

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room sits atop that Pulitzer Prize predictions list I’ve mentioned a few times previously, the same that guided me to read There There (now at #2) and Asymmetry (my favorite of these three, but down to #11). Kushner’s book is a blindingly fast read built around a compelling central character, although the story itself fell short of my expectations and I was never sure what Kushner was trying to express in either the main story or the many subplots throughout the novel. It’s clearly a feminist novel, but perhaps too hopeless and scattered to get that core point across.

The Mars Room centers on Romy Hall, a woman serving two life terms for a murder that will be explained partway through the book, as she details her experience going from sentencing to jail and then serving time in a women’s prison in California while also giving flashbacks to the traumatic life that got her to this point. Romy encounters other women incarcerated for similar reasons, crimes against a society that had brutalized them first, as well as a small cast of unusual side characters who get more development than most secondary characters do in novels but whose stories end abruptly enough that their presence ends up unsatisfying.

The most prominent of these additional characters is the trans woman Conan, whose story would probably be worthy of her own book – although Kushner uses male pronouns to refer to her because the book is written in Romy’s voice, and Romy can’t see Conan as anything but male. Conan is originally sorted into a men’s prison, then is transferred to the women’s prison, but is kept separate from gen pop while authorities try to sort out what to do with her, during which time the other prisoners aware of her presence split into two factions around her status in the jail. This subplot was both as interesting and as nuanced as Romy’s until Kushner cut it short by turning it into a device to push Romy’s plot towards its denouement. It does the Conan character a disservice to use her as a prop rather than even beginning to truly explore the plight of a trans person in our prison system, or using a trans character to illuminate the way our prisons serve to dehumanize everyone incarcerated in them.

The other side characters who get more prominent billing in The Mars Room feel too tangential to the main story and end up distractions when it becomes clear that Kushner isn’t going to tie them together with Romy’s narrative. The dirty cop Doc ends up getting what’s coming to him, in a sense, but before then recounts his history of corruption and violence against suspects, provoked and unprovoked, but the connection to Romy is never established. The prison teacher Gordon at least has more to do with with Romy, in part because he becomes platonically involved with many of the prisoners he teaches, which means he inserts himself into Romy’s story and provides her with a critical piece of information that spurs the action that ends the book, although, again, he’s more of a prop than a fully-realized character (and, ultimately, not that interesting).

There’s one point of social criticism in The Mars Room that deserves far more exploration than Kushner gives it, although in fairness to her I’m not sure how much more she could have done within this plot. Romy committed a crime against someone whom she believed, with reason, posed a threat to her and her son, but her public defender refuses to let her testify (and explains why) and also has very little time to spend on her or any of his cases. If you are poor in this country and are arrested for a crime, you will get a public defender who is probably competent and capable but wildly overloaded with work and thus given no time to devote to cases where that same lawyer might achieve much better results for the client given more time. Locking Up Our Own looked at this same issue and gave a statistic that, I think, claimed that public defenders get an average of about four minutes to work on any specific case. This system is totally broken even before we ask whether it is biased against women who commit violent acts against men who assault them or threaten to do so. Romy has been broken against the wheel, and the act that put her in prison for life was, at the very least, worthy of more consideration and likely more mercy than she received. The ways in which this world robs women, especially women without means, of everything from their dignity to their agency to their lives, are myriad, and define the plot at the core of The Mars Room. Perhaps Kushner had the right kind of anger, but just needed another story to express it.