The Mars Room

But early in The Mars Room, Kushner’s third novel — the result of four years of intensive research into the California prison system (and, by extension, the American prison industrial complex) — one of her characters makes precisely such a reference, invoking Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Rather than an awkward or heavy-handed gesture, the comparison proves a key to the project of this book, one that offers humanity to people who are often denied both, one that examines guilt, redemption, and the larger societal systems into which so many individuals disappear. It asks us to think about how people might be able to live beyond the things that have happened to them, and about who is and who is not allowed such second chances.
Kushner is a hugely compelling prose stylist, switching easily between viewpoints and voices, and seamlessly incorporating narrative flourishes such as including interstitial excerpts from Ted Kazyncki’s diaries. Beyond these rhetorical skills, she is a writer who has proven her commitment to the task of situating the political within the personal to demonstrate how one cannot be unstitched from the other. Nevertheless, the prospect of a book about the experience of life in prison without parole by a successful, white writer who has herself never done time is a queasy one; possession of these stories might, some would argue, best be left to those who have lived these particular experiences. The voices of incarcerated people have been and still are routinely silenced, replaced by false narratives that either glamorize or vilify the individuals caught within the gigantic ongoing atrocity of the American prison system.. But Kushner is not wholly distant from her subject matter:. She has been forthcoming in interviews about her childhood in in druggy, working class 1980s San Francisco, and how that personal experiences maps onto the backstory of The Mars Room‘s protagonist Romy Hall, as seen in flashback. It’s possible to read Romy’s story as the author writing herself parallel life; what if I had had just a few fewer advantages, had made just a few more bad choices, had been a little worse at a survival and at passing into the worlds of wealth and acceptance?
Other inmate characters are the result of years of research – Kushner has spoken about the incarcerated or formerly incarcerated women she befriended over the course of work on this novel, many of whom she has advocated for and helped with legal and financial resources. Secondary characters in the novel are based on women and trans men Kushner knows in real life through this research and advocacy work. Their lives in the novel are vivid perhaps because they are more narrated second-hand than invented, in a style that edges close to the seam between fiction and journalism.
But no amount of speculative personal history or meticulous research – and her research is vast, providing a fabric of detail and fact so complete that its seams do not show during The Mars Room’s heartbreaking deep dive into the prison-industrial complex- is quite sufficient to dispel the novel’s inherent queasiness. In a moment, and in a country, where demagogues cast those who have committed crimes as “animals,” telling the story of incarcerated individuals, especially in such a compelling, human, and empathetic way as Kushner does here, is an urgent project. But at the same time, a novel such as this one raises difficult questions of how privilege determines who gets to tell stories.
To some degree, this problem at the heart of the novel also becomes its subject. The central story of The Mars Room is Romy’s experience in prison, coupled with an extended flashback to the crime that put her there: Romy kills a man who stalked obsessively until she was afraid for her life and her son’s. “Because there was a kid present,” she tells us, “they tacked on a charge of child endangerment. Nevermind that it was my child, and the person endangering him was Kurt Kennedy.” These events unfold with the terrifying inevitability of Greek tragedy (another character, imprisoned for murdering her child, at one point tells the other women the story of Medea, explaining “He took everything from her, including her children. She had put him in pain. So he could know her pain. It’s written into history. It’s real. You can’t do that to a person without damage. He tore her life apart, and so she found a way to do the same to him. That’s my only comfort. It’s very very very small. It’s so small I can’t see it most of the time”). Readers, however enter the novel not through Romy, or any of the other incarcerated individuals, but by way of a graduate student in English Literature who has dropped out of the Berkeley PhD program, given up on his dissertation on Thoreau, and taken a job teaching GED classes at a women’s correctional facility.
Gordon Hauser is exactly the kind of person one might expect to pick up Rachel Kushner’s new novel — educated, erudite, at once convinced of and tormented by his own political awareness. He feels sympathy for his students, reflects on their humanity and the unfairness of their lives and circumstances, but his recognition of that humanity is first expressed, in an early scene in the novel, through his surprise at how many of the women are beautiful. He develops a crush on Romy, and investigates her son’s whereabouts for her after her mother’s death. At home late at night, he searches the names of the women he teaches on the internet and reads the results, the information on their crimes and convictions, sorting them into more and less guilty and more and less human; his crush on Romy fizzles when he reads the account of the act that put her in prison. Reading his search results, he considers that his motivations are essentially selfish; what seems to be about helping others is really about absolving himself, something he has the power to do in the way the women he teaches do not. “He didn’t know what he was searching for. He hoped some equilibrium could be established from the process of obtaining facts. He also sensed that this thing about facts and equilibrium was a lie he told himself to go after squalid details that were none of his business.” Even when doing favors and feeling sympathy for these women, he is still at a remove, reading their crimes in the same way one might read a tabloid.
Ultimately Gordon just is passing through, defined in relation to these women only by his ability to leave. His story has no real conclusion, nor do we see him changed by his experience. He fades silently out of the story because he has the privilege to be able to do so. It’s not hard to see how Gordon scrolling through his Google results is a stand-in for the reader, reading in the safety of their own home. In one telling scene, Gordon returns to Berkeley and attends a party with other graduate students who are naively fascinated with his job at a correctional facility. “The interaction brought back anxieties from graduate school, the way people could casually criticize others they didn’t know anything about.”
Hauser is also the character who repeatedly references Crime and Punishment. Kushner characterizes him through his constant return to literature, the need to link what he sees to the books he studies in order to explain it. “Gordon’s knowledge of murder had had been for most of his life, confined to literature. Raskolnikov killed the old pawnbroker. It was a feverish decision of Raskolnikov’s to destroy his own life and shift into dreamtime, a dream that would not break, as a fever might…It was almost funny, how everything in Dostoyevsky’s novels came down to rubles. A word that sounded like something heavy and made of brass. Rubles. Put them in a sock, like you’d put a padlock, and swing.”
Dostoyevsky’s novel ultimately considers this violence and these brutal realities — in which everything comes down to money and the desperate lack of it destroys lives and people — in the context of Christian faith. Redemption is possible in Crime and Punishment in explicitly religious terms. Kushner’s story, however, looks at how the same kind of bad luck and desperation, the way the numerous tragedies to which we assign the heartless catch-all term “circumstances” conspire to trap people in their own lives, in purely secular terms, without the mystical hope religious faith offers. Realities are simply that; lives are only what happens in them. Near the end of the novel, Remy reflects, “the lie of regret and of life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails.” Herded through their own lives by the implacable forces of money, class, and race these women have been defined solely by their worst moments, cut off from the river of empathy that washes through the lives of people just a hairsbreadth away.
Crime and Punishment examines how one might commit an atrocious act and still be human within it and beyond it, worthy of love and of redemption. Kushner’s novel approaches these questions in a world where god is absent. Here, empathy is made possible by telling the small stories of these women without making them into saints or lessons, without sorting them into guilty and not guilty, but rather simply allowing them to be human, and visible, people who jump to life on the page and demand to be considered as more than the sum of a police report or a dismissive sweeping condemnation. That empathy allows these women to be redeemed, not from their crimes, but from our society’s brutal attempts to render them invisible.