The Mars Room: A Novel

3-3.5. I was pulled deeper into this as I went on and as the author went into the character’s inner monologue. Well-written about people whose reality we don’t often consider, how fragile their existence, how poverty and abuse lead to criminalization. While some bark about their “choices,” this lack of empathy and denial of two systems just ensure that stratification continues. No one chooses where or when they are born, who their parents are, or has any meaningful control over these significant factors the first 18 years of their life. Books like this are important if they can bridge a gap, engender greater understanding. I did not like the author’s voice at first, but it just grew into Romy’s voice. And Kim Gordon did the music!! ?

Why the hell did the author narrate this?! Her voice is so painful to listen to I can’t even finish it. Someone really should have talked her out of this. Huge mistake.

Shattering , taut, accomplished, full of sardonic wry hidden wells of wisdom and truth, unnerving and deeply disturbing portrait of what our America has really become for way too many of us.

A bit anticlimactic. Some interesting characters but at the end I was wishing the last 9hrs of listening was refunded to my brain.

Typical liberal viewpoint. Enabling others to get money with no effort and no calling to account is widely touted by the “progressives”. If poverty inevitably leads to crime, why are there many ethical people of low socioeconomic status? Drug abuse, laziness, and a sense of entitlement expecting others to support a life of indolence certainly are main contributors.

“The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless.”

-3 stars-

You know, I'm not going to lie. I'm kind of disappointed. Like I really wanted to like this book and had some good expectations for this book that just were not met.
I think the biggest problem for me in this book, was that the book sort of jumped into the story with no explaining to what was going on. Sometimes this works for books other times, it doesn't. It didn't for this book. I'm also really confused as to the timelines and pov's in this book. It was mostly in Romy's pov, and then ever so often it would switch to some random guy's pov in the middle of the woods... Yeah, safe to say I was confused.
The book and plot itself was quite good. I love the women with women sort of rep, but once again I don't feel like it was anything amazing. Then again, I could just have like really high expectations but still.
I think the book had the potential to be something amazing, but just isn't. The writing could have been so freaking good, but it's just sort of confusing and hard to understand/connect with. I hope to see a re-realease of this book someday that's edited and not as confusing!

“I block certain things out. Everyone does. It’s healthy.”

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018

My ninth book from the longlist is perhaps the most difficult to assess. In normal circumstances the Californian prison system would not be a subject I would choose to read about, but I did find quite a lot to like in this book.

The central story of Romy, a lap dancer and mother of a young boy, who is jailed for life for attacking a stalker she finds on her doorstep, is powerful and moving. Her story is interleaved with the stories of many other prisoners, one member of prison staff who works as a literacy teacher, Romy's victim and Ted Kaczynski a.k.a. the Unabomber.

I did feel the book tried to do too much, and by doing so lost its focus and became a little tedious and repetitive, but it does have sections I liked a lot.

One of those books that pulls the reader in, even though, in this case, you are accompanying the main character to prison most likely for the rest of her life. I started out thinking I might just sample it and soon found I was a quarter of the way through. Strong narrative voice(s) describe the gritty, the dark, the lonely, the desperate...not a walk in the park, though one is eventually led "back to nature." The diary entries (you'll see), though intriguing, I found to be unnecessary in retrospect. Kushner's writing is strong enough to avoid anything even close to gimmickry.

I was really having a hard time getting into this. It kind of jumps around a bit, back and forth in time, between two or even three different characters. And I guess, for me, it was the style of writing. I just wasn't that interested, after 100 pages, in what happened to anyone in the story.

Started this but when I couldn't get into it, I looked up reviews. The Mars Room got plenty of praise, but that was almost always qualified by comments that alluded to horrible things in the book ... so I've got out before I get sucked in, if it's good novel.

In her novel of prison life, Kushner wants the reader to straddle the line here between knowing her characters have done awful things, and yet have sympathy for the brutal treatment they receive. Romy is no innocent--she committed the crime of which she's accused, and her behavior towards her son is not wonderful. But neither does she deserve what she gets in return.

There's a tricky balance of humor, rage, and pathos here. For the most part, it works, but the rage and open politics of the book (which objectively, I largely agree with) occasionally feel a little too obvious.

The book shines during its blackly comedic portrayals of prison life--prison cheesecakes, Pruno, and yelling death row inmates. The inmates in Romy's block are serious offenders, many in for long time and abandoned by family, and the bleakness of their situation is evident in the descriptions of that breakdown.

While the inmates get fleshed out backstories, the prison largely remains a faceless, oppressive entity. The only exception is a continuing education teacher, who struggles to maintain boundaries with the inmates in between reading Ted Kaczynski in his cabin.

The book was a nice change from the books I normally read, it had the real point of view of an American prisoner. The story jumped around a lot and many times I either had to go back and reread something or I would have to think about what happened last night I read about those people. The story does go into details which allows you to paint a picture in your head.

The Unjustness of American Justice

Are you of the mind that each person must accept personal responsibility for how he or she leads their life, and that all that befalls them is of their own doing? Or, are you more inclined to think people, yes, must bear a certain degree of personal responsibility, but that they often have little control of many aspects of their lives, from formative years on into adulthood. In The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner speaks to you in the latter group, but she also appeals to you among the formers. People, she seems to say, do not develop in a vacuum, do not live in one either. Society must accept some responsibility for how members turn out, because it’s society that bestows upon people crippling disadvantages and encouraging advantages. In The Mars Room, society as represented by our justice system, doesn’t come off very well when dealing with flawed people it has helped create.

The novel follows protagonist Romy Hall from the time she enters the California prison system. She had worked as a stripper and lap dancer at a club in San Francisco called The Mars Room to support herself and her child, Jackson. There, she attracted a clientele of men who requested her for lap dances, among them Kurt Kennedy, an ugly brute of a fellow with a leg damaged in a motorcycle accident. Kurt develops an imaginary relationship with Romy and begins stalking her, even after she leaves the Mars Room to avoid him. He finds her, though, and in a confrontation kills him by bashing in his brains. As a result of what she sees as incompetent legal representation by an assigned public defender, she receives two life sentences with added time, ensuring she will never leave prison. Not to put to fine a point on it, is this really justice?

From the prison bus to incarceration, Romy interacts with a variety of female prisoners all imprisoned for a variety of violent crimes, from robbery/murder to child murder. Kushner portrays everything about their treatment as dehumanizing and their accommodations as second rate, particularly in comparison to what they imagine men receive. Kushner doesn’t have to work too hard to accomplish this, just reproduce the signage and literature from prisons.

One day, Gordon Hauser appears on the scene. He, in addition to Kurt Kennedy, is a character with his own voice. Hauser, who has encountered difficulty in pursuit of his advanced degree, takes a job at the prison helping women interested earn their GEDs. Prison personnel, of course, deride him. As with all prison employees, at first he undervalues his charges and, like other employees, finds himself being manipulated by the women for their own purposes. Romy, he discovers, is different, an intelligent women who seems to want to learn. He orders her books via Amazon delivered directly to her, as prison rules forbid direct gifts. While Romy does enjoy the books, she hopes to learn about her son through him. At first resistant, he does deliver news to her that proves devastating and propels her into a desperate last act.

Kushner’s writing here conveys the rawness and brutality of the women’s lives but it is not without humor. If there is a message it’s that society has had a hand in creating these women and has chosen to banish them from its collective mind to a remote dismal prison into an equally dismal geography removed from sight and reach.

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.

In 2003 Romy Hall starts serving “two life sentences” at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, located in arid Central California. Nothing about Romy’s former life is auspicious. Neglected by her addict mother, she is raped before entering her teens and becomes a drug addict and sex worker. Compared to this, finding steady work at a second-rate San Francisco strip club called The Mars Room seems a step in the right direction, particularly because she now has a son, named Jackson. It is in The Mars Room where she actually seems to find her calling, and, as well, something that resembles fulfilment and, more importantly, independence: she can give herself whatever name she wants, become someone else when on the job and pretend none of that exists when she’s out in the world living her actual life. But nothing ever works out for Romy. When a creepy client becomes fixated on her and begins stalking her, she is forced to leave The Mars Room and relocate to Los Angeles. Problem solved, or so she thinks. But a former friend gives her up, and the client tracks her down in LA and goads her into killing him. The story is told in retrospect, moving back and forth in time, with Romy facing a life behind bars with no hope of parole. Rachel Kushner populates this uncompromising and at times brutal novel with an assortment of female characters facing lengthy sentences, some on death row, and some of the men in Romy’s life, devoting chapters to each of them, which gives the narrative a disjointed feel. Despite the bleak prison setting, the story features plenty of humour, though admittedly of a dark and despairing quality. Stanville, the guards, and the covert underbelly of corruption that thrives within its precincts are convincingly rendered. But the real villain of The Mars Room is a justice system that is ready, willing and able to condemn those who live in the shadows, those who lack resources and opportunity, and those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law because life has made them vulnerable.

I started reading this book with high expectations. Both Stephen King and Margaret Atwood commented on the back cover that it was a great novel, one that stays with you. A female prison story set in Los Angeles. I turned the pages and didn't find it very interesting, but I hoped it would improve based on the aforementioned comments, yet I reached the last page and that didn't happen. It is worth noting that it is easy to read, as it is very fragmented and you can pick it up at any moment. Moral: When buying a book, rely on recommendations from friends, acquaintances, or literary critics, as it seems that writers have an agreement to praise each other to sell more novels. (Translated from Spanish)

The Mars Room has many storylines that never really connect. I kept reading to find out about the few characters I cared about, but nothing. I had hoped for a surprise ending, but that didn't happen either. Not a book I can recommend to others.

"The Mars Room" is a sad, elegiac book, and not just because it's main character is set to spend a long, long time in the joint. It's a lament, of a sort, for the character's youth and a loose, chaotic upbringing in post-Haight in San Francisco. It also commemorates a wide-open sort of America that the author suggests is fast disappearing: the reader senses how all sorts of new pressures have hemmed in our lives, from the corrections system to industrial agriculture to the fact that people like the book's narrator simply cannot find a place to live in San Francisco these days. In life, Henry David Thoreau might have been the original hippie to playact being a wilderness type -- he spent a short year on land that Ralph Waldo Emerson owned -- but Kushner's references to him here seem entirely appropriate. The descriptions of the prison system are both detailed and harrowing: I've never spent a day in jail, but it's hard to imagine a more restrictive environment than what Kushner describes here. There are places where I feel she connects her symbols a little too neatly, and other places where she points encouragingly to new spaces that might be opening up, as when she describes the woman prison's first transsexual inmate. And the book is beautifully written, in a graceful, balanced, voice that doesn't sacrifice clarity for emotional resonance.

At the same time, that's exactly the problem with the book. The novel's main character makes it clear that she's a reader and has a had more experience with high culture than you might expect, but I was never quite clear on how she got to came by this, especially since we don't hear much about her parents and most of the kids she went to school with seem to have either ended up either in jail or pretty far down the socioeconomic scale. Who got her reading and made it possible to finish high school when so many of the people she knew didn't?, Why is she able to narrate a story like this one so beautifully? This may just be a quibble about realism, but her (first-person) voice doesn't seem to so much as waver, even after spending a few months in what is essentially solitary confinement. It's clear that she's a survivor, but it's hard to imagine that level of emotional resilience is even possible. The answer just might be that Kushner can really, really write has a story that she needs to get across to the reader, which is perfectly reasonable. But I still feel that there are some missing chapters here, a part of this story that wasn't told. I've got some bones to pick with "The Mars Room," but it's a beautiful, readable novel that certainly worth your time if you're interested in where America as a whole might be headed.

The more I read of this perfectly fine novel, the more I struggled to understand the point of the whole enterprise. There’s nothing wrong with the writing and it has valuable things to say about poverty and addiction and the incarceration of young women. It’s just it brought nothing terribly original to the table either. Didn’t Orange is the New Black already cover this ground? I can’t imagine this sticking around for long in my consciousness.

A far easier read than the Flamethrowers, but seemingly less ambitious. Suffers as it comes so soon after Orange Is The New Black, hitting so many of the same beats - white privileged main character, attempts to exploit lonely guards etc. Smarter and more philosophical than the show, but less dramatically rewarding too.

"The Mars Room" is not for the faint of heart, that's for sure, but if you are not overly offended by books that take a frank look at sexual issues (in this case, the sex industry itself), you are going to be absolutely fascinated by it. Author Rachel Kushner has already twice been a National Book Award finalist, and it is easy to see why.

The novel's central character is a convicted murderer, and as the book opens, she is being transported to a woman's prison from which she is extremely unlikely to ever leave. Romy Hall is there to serve two consecutive life sentences, and the state of California is determined to make sure that she serve every day of those sentences. This is her story, told in flashback, but several people who play significant roles in Hall's life will also have their stories told in some detail.

This is no feel-good novel with a happy ending. This is about life in prison and how the incarcerated population manages to make it from one day to the next. It is often ugly, sometimes heartbreaking, and every once in a while it is even a bit humorous. But reader beware: it is explicit and it is realistic. Just like life.

I knew that The Mars Room was named one of the Best Books of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. I had not read any reviews which, of course, was my big mistake. If I had known the main subject of the book was life in a women's state prison, I would not have read it because I already have enough stress in my life.

The novel is composed of some short chapters, really more like vignettes, but some of the chapters were normal size. Maybe this, along with the chapters switching between first and third person, are what made it seem disjointed. The flow was not good throughout. There were too many unnecessary characters which added little to the story.

The Mars Room is a club where women give lap dances and the protagonist worked there. She goes to prison for murdering her stalker and is given two life sentences plus 6 years. In the back stories, we learn about her and other prisoner's upbringings. For me, it was gruesome reading as was learning about life in prison. It was hard to have sympathy for the prisoners because of their choices in life although some of them had few choices. It was as though they didn't understand that if you break the law, you pay the consequences.

If you want to read about immorality, drugs, prostitution, violence, murder, bad cops, and child neglect, be sure to read this novel. The only good thing about it is that it brings attention to life in women's prisons and when you are in big trouble, unless you can afford a good lawyer, you'll probably end up there.

Unputdownable.

I know it's lazy to describe something as x meets y, but all the way through this I was thinking - Denis Johnson meets "Orange is the New Black". The way that Kushner uses language - and the hopelessness of the lives described - reminded me a lot of Johnson. And I thought of OITNB not just because the story is set in a woman's prison, but also because of the structure - the main story focuses on a woman called Romy Hall, but there are also chapters telling us the backstory of many of the secondary characters.

This is significant because for most of the people in this book, it's unusual for them to be seen as a human being. They have spent a lot of their lives being processed by blindly hostile bureaucracies.

No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn’t know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.

Equally, for the men who go to the Mars Room (where Romy worked as a lapdancer), the women in front of them are not people but fantasies - and most of the women who work there have in their youth encountered men who treated them as means to an end.

This book would be almost unreadably bleak if it wasn't so good, and so compassionate towards its characters - not just because of what has been done to them, but because of what they have done. It doesn't pretend that they are angels, but it does recognise that having committed a crime is also something which has a huge impact on the criminal.

You go to ad seg and you don’t stop having feelings. You hear a woman cry and it’s real. It’s not a courtroom, where they ask all the pertinent and wrong questions, the niggling repeated demands for details, to sort contradiction and establish intent. The quiet of the cell is where the real question lingers in the mind of a woman. The one true question, impossible to answer. The why did you. The how. Not the practical how, the other one. How could you have done such a thing. How could you.

Highly recommended.

Such a different book. The life sentence and the prison scenes were scary. Sounds like it was self-defense and a bad attorney--but was it? There were so many unanswered questions for me in the end. And who was the voice in the chapters with the different print? It bothers me that I still don't know. So did I miss something?

Romy Hall is in Prison, serving a life sentence. This book is her reminiscing about being in county, then the buss ride up to Stanville, somewhere in the Central Valley. She mostly remembers her past--her wild childhood in San Francisco, her years working as a stripper at The Mars Room. The people she knew, the boyfriend who she is still pining over who is out there somewhere. Her son. And she talks about the women she is imprisoned with, their pasts and their present.

So, it's OK. I don't quit get why this was shortlisted (or longlisted, really). I also did not love The Flamethrowers, so I think I don't get Kushner.

The best parts, for me, were her descriptions of California and San Francisco. The errors, though, drive me crazy. Magic Mountain is not in Ventura County, it's in LA County. You don't go into Ventura County driving from LA over the Grapevine. Is this sloppiness? Or is it meant to tell us something about Romy--maybe she's not as smart as she thinks? But that feels like I am reading way too much into the author's intentions. I am guessing plain old sloppiness.

A disturbing fictionalized look at what often happens to those raised on the "wrong side of the tracks". Where poverty, lack of education, imprisoned family members, crime, addiction, violence and sexual abuse are as common as dance and music lessons, after-school sports, theater and educational vacations. It doesn't always work this way, but the odds are stacked against one born into a family with generational poverty. An engrossing and intuitive story.

I enjoyed reading the different perspectives, Tony’s and Gordon’s. The diaries of Ted Kaczynski were a nice edition. I am intrigued by women going to prison, so many of them not deserving to be there. In the age of Orange is the New Black hopefully women who deserve to be free will be released. For people who want to read more books like this, especially nonfiction I recommend Out of Orange, Orange is the New Black, & Inside This Place, Not of It.

Looking forward to reading more of Kushner’s books.

The Mars Room is the second book I’ve read on the Man Booker award shortlist. I had read Kushner’s first book The Flamethrowers and hated it. I don’t think I finished it. This one however is very well-written. It’s about a woman, Romy, a past stripper and drug addict who is serving 2 life sentences for murdering her stalker (no spoiler, this is told in the first chapter). She is devastated by the fact she will never see her son again. Along with Romy’s story, multiple chapters also tell vignettes about the other characters, ie the teacher at the prison, a corrupt police officer in the men’s prison, some of her prison mates and at the end her stalker. It also has multiple excerpts from Ted Kosinki’s journal.
The writing is so well-done. The characters have deep introspections about life, nature, society but it always flows with the story. Note: there’s a good amount of violence and very little hope in this one. Not a pick-me-up at all! If you watched Orange is the New Black you can handle it.

This is well written. The author really captures this culture of prison life. She neither makes these people good or bad, they just are. They are where they are, flawed characters that are also very, very real people. It brings up the question though; does poverty excuse people from being responsible for violent and bad behavior? This is our October bookclub read, I may be adding more to this review after I’ve had time to think about it.