A gritty,
authentic fictional account of a 29-year-old mother serving two consecutive
life sentences at a Women's Correctional Facility.
Rachel Kushner (The
Flamethrowers) paints a dark and gritty picture of the U.S.
prison system and the larger, contemporary world in her provocative novel, The Mars Room. The action is set at the
fictional Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, in the remote Central Valley
of California. A diverse cast of inmates--hardscrabble women who formerly lived
on the margins of society, suffering from poverty, abuse, neglect, drug
addiction and sex exploitation--are forced to adapt and make a life inside
prison walls.
The central protagonist is Romy Leslie Hall, a 29-year-old inmate and former
lap dancer at the Mars Room, a notorious, seedy strip club in San Francisco.
Romy is serving two consecutive life sentences for murdering a man who
relentlessly stalked her.
Romy--bright and well-read, despite
having grown up in unseemly conditions--has a young son, Jackson, who becomes
entangled in the child welfare bureaucracy. Although prison separates Romy from
Jackson for four long years--and she is ultimately stripped of her rights to
find him--her desperate longing and love for him endures. She goes to great
lengths to learn more about his status and track him down.
Romy's tragic, hard-luck story is one of many explored in a complex novel that
keeps readers off-balance yet fully immersed. Supporting characters and their
sordid proclivities and recidivism--along with subplots about an incarcerated
dirty cop and a sensitive teacher at the prison--provide an unflinching look at
brutality and power plays within the perimeters of razor wire--and beyond.
