Review: The Mars Room

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There are a lot of ways into this powerful novel, but, as I got toward the end, it occurred to me that it’s most insistently about the nature of loneliness.

That’s a bigger claim than it seems, since this novel is so clearly about other things as well. For one, it’s about the way women suffer in the penal system, how the poor and unfortunate can lose everything because they don’t know how to defend themselves. Here, for instance, Romy might not have gone to jail at all, or might have gone for something dramatically less than two life sentences-plus, if she’d had an attorney able to demonstrate that she’d been the victim of sustained and disturbing sexual stalking.

It also reflects one kind of post-modernist school. A quick search tells me she understands herself as inspired by Don DeLillo (a fine inspiration to select, I’d say) and there’s evidence here of someone who acknowledges the difficulty (impossibility?) of rendering characters in all their dimensionality yet who attempts it all the same. This is a novel of ideas, but it’s simultaneously a story of characters, above all Romy, who recognize the extent to which their denied the full experience of life. One reflection of that is the impressive way Kushner de-eroticizes the business of sex. There are graphic parts here – Romy is a stripper, after all – but we get them as transactional experiences.

And this is also a powerfully feminist novel, one where the experience of women matters in and for itself, independent of men or even masculinity. Yes, most of this is set in a women’s prison, but it’s deeper than that. Romy defines herself on her own terms, on the basis of her own desires and choices. She’s not concerned with what others think or even what they might think. She is entirely of herself, and she shows a refreshing self-awareness throughout.

But I’m struck by the nature of loneliness here because I think part of what Kushner is expressing – depressingly – is that the human condition makes true connection much harder than we can imagine. In what may be my favorite quote in a novel full of rich language and insight, Romy describes her first time shooting up heroin as, “an experience exactly the way a young girl dreams love can be.” The idea is all there in that moment. Romy falls “in love,” but it isn’t with anyone. It’s self-absorbed and detached.

We see this at the level of the story itself. I hope it isn’t much of a [SPOILER] to report that Romy loses everyone she cares even remotely about. The novel opens with her stuck on a bus taking her to the maximum-security prison where she’ll spend the rest of her life, and it follows her through life inside, the eventual death of her mother, the loss of her son as he’s adopted away from her, and through to her brief pointless escape. No one gets in. No one matters. The man she’s killed thinks of her by her stage name as he stalks her; she thinks of him as “Creep” Kennedy. Each casts the other as a character in a private experience, transparently so.

We see it as well at a macro level. I’ve been struck by a species of contemporary novel, informed by postmodernism, that I describe as the “rhizomatic” novel. I think of Colum McCann in particular, but it includes Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Joan Silber’s Fools among others. The striking feature of those novels is that we see a fragmented story that, from a novelist’s eye view if none of the characters’, connects disparate characters in an interconnected web.

In this case, though, Kushner does the opposite. For all that her characters overlap in their encounters, they affect each other only incidentally and without enduring influence. The close of the novel, for instance, brings her heartbreaking realization that, with her recapture, she’ll never get to know her son’s experience. “He is on his path as I am on mine,” she says, and that truth extends in other directions. She learns only very late that her best friend, Eva, has died, and she learns that from Eva’s father who confesses to having been so estranged from his daughter that he didn’t know of the death for years himself. Our second most significant character, Gordon, a would-be English professor who teaches in the prison for a time, agrees to mail a letter from a woman he thinks is crazy; he never knows that it results in the near murder of another character, and he never has cause to reflect on what he might have learned from his throw-away favor for someone. And the Unabomber makes an appearance, writing his manifesto against technology – and against the possibility of human connection – at the same time but isolated and removed from everyone else.

That is, there is something that might look like a vast web connection these characters, but it tears the moment we put any weight on it. None of these characters ultimately influence the others. They’re in dark situations that overlap, but even darker is the sense that we can never come to know them since they can never get beyond the narrow limits of their own experience. It’s a grim picture of a lonely world.


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