While the Golden State is often invoked in connection with freedom, reinvention, and choice, only Texas incarcerates more people. In The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner, one of our greatest intellectual novelists, grapples with what it is to be a poor woman in a California prison, what it is to be part of a state’s underclass, to have one’s life, including one’s odds of going to prison, circumscribed and determined since birth. Readers enter the fictional maximum-security Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, in the Central Valley, through the perspective of 29-year-old Romy Hall. She grew up in the foggy Sunset district of San Francisco and stripped at the club the book is named after, before receiving consecutive life sentences for killing her stalker, one of the club’s regulars.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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On trial in this perceptive novel is the criminal justice system that gives rise to mass incarceration. Part of what’s so smart in Kushner’s portrayal of “justice” is her spiky observations of the well-heeled prosecutors and the unkempt, under-resourced do-gooders who serve the indigent as public defenders yet make grave errors. Inside the prison, we meet other memorably sketched characters, from gentle Latina repeat offender Sammy Fernandez to Doc, a corrupt police officer turned inmate, to a GED teacher who is fascinated by Ted Kaczynski. This eagle-eyed, unsparing novel is an astute consideration of a birthright of hardship.•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
