Rachel Kushner is 49 and has written three novels, which is the right number, an average of one for each decade of her adult life, when you consider the kind of novels she writes. Telex from Cuba (2008) took place among American expatriates in revolutionary Cuba, while The Flamethrowers (2013) alternated between developments in the New York City creative scene of the early 1970s and the mass protests that spread through Italy in 1977. These are books that sink deeply into a specific era and its politics, constructed from a mix of facts and authorial pet passions: motorbikes, industry, anarchy and art.
The Mars Room, Kushner’s third, brings us to her native California. Its protagonist, Romy Hall, is 29 years old and embarking on two life sentences (plus six years) at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Romy’s crime was braining to death her stalker, once a customer at a San Francisco strip club called the Mars Room, where she worked. (The six years were for “endangering” her seven-year-old son Jackson while she did it.) Even before we learn about the bloated, rapist scumbag she murdered, we expect to feel sympathy for Romy, and we do, but the fact of her crime remains. Kushner’s investigation into female incarceration takes it as a given, then asks: what next?
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