The Mars Room

The Mars Room / Rachel Kushner, 338 pgs. read by the author

The Mars Room is a seedy strip club in San Francisco.  Romy Hall, a stripper known as Vanessa is the main character in this book.  She is serving a couple of life sentences for killing a man who stalked her.  She is flawed as is the justice system that ignores her circumstances and provides only an overworked public defender to decide her fate.  Romy's story is not the only one we hear. There are fellow prisoners, staff, some people whose connection is not obvious to me.  Everyone is quirky and interesting with a unique story.  I think the book makes clear there isn't an easy way to classify the people, their situations and the circumstances that bring them to the novel.  At first I was unsure of the author reading this book but ended up enjoying the audio version very much. The voice of Romy comes through very convincingly.

The Mars Room

The Mars Room: a Novel / Rachel Kushner, 336 p.

Romy Hall is serving multiple life sentences in California for killing a man who relentlessly stalked her.  Her extenuating circumstances, and there are many, were never presented in court by her hopelessly overworked public defender, but the reader learns all of them.  Surrounding Romy are a fascinating group of flawed but human fellow prisoners, all drawn in terrific detail.  The novel is full of gorgeous visuals of California desert and mountains, perfectly tied to the narrative, and the writing is of the 'can't stop until the last page' variety.  But something fell short here, though it's hard to say what, exactly.  It wouldn't make sense for a novel such as this to have a happy ending, and I didn't want one.  Still, Kushner seems to have put all kinds of things in here - references to Thoreau, and the Unabomber, and ancillary characters whose stories just fizzle out - and then grown tired of it, too early for the reader.  Great writing but not, in my view, a great novel.