The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner
For the past few days, I have been immersed in the work of Rachel Kushner. Mars Room is the first of her books to read. It’s a novel that is largely set in a women’s prison. It’s a remarkable work.
It opens with a bus that transfers the women prisoners, during the night, at the fictional Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, in California’s Central Valley. “anything to shield the regular people from having to look at us,” thinks Romy Hall, the central protagonist in the book.
Romy Hall is serving two life sentences without parole. Alongside her are Conan, Sammy, Button, and Laura Lipp, also prisoners, who share their stories.
The Mars Room is not a book about the prisons. It certainly describes the life of women prisoners in a prison, but mostly is about the lives of these women and the narrow options that some people have from very early in life. It’s astounding how deeply Rachel Kushner has entered this world made entirely of concrete and electric fences. A world of surveillance, control and restrictions and complete lack of privacy. Still, within this inhuman world, these women have developed their own methods and imaginative ways to cope with the situation and persevere. It’s a kind of collective intelligence and wisdom that enable them to survive.
There is no judgement or any kind of criticism in this book, only people and lives against a system that has reduced them to manageable binaries. right and wrong, guilty and innocent
An impressive novel, I almost read it in one go.
The United States has a very large population of incarcerated people, in fact it has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to World Population Review, about 25% of the world’s total prison population is in the United States, which holds about 2.19 million prisoners as of 2019 (1.38 million in federal and state prisons, 745,200 in jails). California, the state in which Kushner’s story takes place, it has the second, after Texas, highest prison population in the country.