A review of the Mars Room by Rachel Kushner (2018)
Imagine you are familiar with Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Bukowski, Thoreau and various other progressive writers, and you are sufficiently impressed by Ted Kaczynski’s diary to quote from it at length in your next novel. What could it be about? Crime and Punishment? Getting inside the head of an American female version of Raskolnikov? Rachel Kushner does just that, at least from my reading of her book. Her protagonist, Romy Hall, is however no poor student whose intellectual faculties somewhat resemble that of the writer but a down-and-out SF sex worker who kills her insane stalker and is now in a Californian state prison for life. This scenario is vastly different from Raskolnikov and all the more unbelievable for the following reasons: to be brought up in an environment where drugs, alcohol, violence and sexual abuse are everyday facts of life will in most cases lack all literary interest simply because the damaged protagonists have lost all normal reasoning and civilized behaviour, hence are characterised by various mental disorders that are extremely difficult to deal with in a humanitarian way – but far more easily dealt with the American way of imprisonment (lock them up and throw away the key). Kushner as a social activist of sorts could have concentrated more on this aspect of crime and punishment, as indeed she does in giving her own voice to Gordon Hauser, the teacher whose job it is to teach the inmates basic literacy and numeracy skills. Whilst it is not inconceivable that a Romy Hall character is a working class intellectual that reads books like the Mars Room, it is quite unlikely. In fact the actual Mars Room as depicted in the novel is what every feminist decries: women’s sexuality exploited by men who are unable to establish a normal relationship with any woman. The myth that some women prostitute themselves by choice (earning easy money), is more or less trotted out here in the character of Romy Hall.
So when Kushner gives voice to Romy Hall, it sounds like what Kushner imagines life would be like if ever she was in such a situation. First of all she must imagine how to write junkie street language – a contradiction in itself – and her idea is that people like that have a very simple English syntax. Kushner should have read Labov’s Language of the Inner City to get some guidance and found that black English at least has as complex a syntax as white English. That damaged street kids and subsequent lap dancers like Romy can have poetic thoughts is not impossible but also rather unlikely, as when she escapes from prison, hiding amongst the trees and at night sees the stars, she ponders ‘Here, I was halfway into the sky. Where people are gone, the world opens. Where people are gone, the night falls upward, black and unmanned’. Hey man, what the fuck is that supposed to mean!
When Kushner gets into the head to Doc, the corrupt LAPD cop who also serves time for murder, she really lets go with the basest of stories and language, graphic sex and violence but punctuated with some positivist advertising: ‘People snub Budweiser for these dumb brands no one’s heard of, but Budweiser is the king of beers for a reason: it’s good.’ And then comes the explanation for Doc’s insane behaviour: his foster father had raped him as a kid and his foster father was loyal to Nixon and the Grand Ole Opry. So is there anyone to blame? Nixon? Nixon as the ultimate asshole of American politics?
Good guy Gordon – the teacher and failed literature graduate (unlike Rachel Kushner as far as I can make out) – watches the news with his friend about Saddam Hussein being hanged. Kushner’s politics are best stated when Gordon notes that the women in prison are denoted as ‘monsters’ by straight society but tens of thousands killed in wars prosecuted by the American military produce no such monikers. While true enough, it is not feasible nor desirable to let the ‘monsters’ off the hook on account of them being victims of the poverty that breeds the crime. In reality the precariat (or lumpen proletariat in Marxist terminology) fostered by the ruling classes (Kushner’s middle class liberals included) breeds dysfunction to such a degree that political re-educations is almost impossible. Sure, to liberate the oppressed from oppression is a theoretically desirable pathway via a pedagogy of the oppressed, as described by Paulo Freire – Gordon Hauser is a Freirean if not stated as such – but unless there is a proletarian revolution that frees prisoners who killed their oppressors AND re-educates these prisoners to become aware of their political situation, pre- and post-revolution, there is no way out of the American nightmare of incarceration. Gordon’s remedy, that he cannot judge anyone but himself, is also a nice theoretical stance but totally useless in the real world.
The level of domestic violence as detailed in the case histories that Kushner uses to propel her story is abysmal. This is another criticism: to take the most extreme of such case histories and weave them together in a women’s prison population and thereby make it sound like your average demographics may be good for sensationalism but not for depicting reality. In New Zealand – my sphere of demographics – the level of domestic violence is some of the worst in the OECD, all predicated on highly dysfunctional family relations where drugs, alcohol, poverty and lack of any education make for a toxic brew that poorly equipped (and poorly paid) armies of social and mental health workers battle with. There are no insights to be had, no Marxist analysis by the low-end drug dealer about supply and demand, no Ted Kaczynskis or RAF or Italian Autonomes that are delivered by police to ED for medical and mental health triage. And BTW, Kaczynski seems to be pretty deluded to me, noting that in one of his diary excerpts provided by Kushner, he also wants to kill ‘communists’.
All this being said, I do realise that the novel creates a very high emotional impact, of a personal tragedy that separates mother and son forever. That Romy loves her son Jackson is however as tragic as the other case of Romy’s fellow inmate, Laura, who killed her child to get revenge on her low-life husband. We all know that children are born innocent and when they become victims of abysmal neglect in wars and crimes (and war crimes) we have to wonder what humanity is all about. Kushner’s description of American women’s prison as hell on earth where women – as ultimate victims of insane men - nevertheless grind out life without parole, as a daily ritual, actually must defy mere literary description.
Yet the narrative technique employed is flawless, weaving in and out of the voices of the main protagonists, with an ending that plucks at the heartstrings, so much so that some readers may consider the book unforgettable, having successfully appealed to their female emotional intelligence.
The book also has a strong sense of location, in particular SF, which Romy thinks is ‘a sad suckville of place’ and yet as a native of SF never gets out of it apart from a short sojourn to LA. The women’s prison in Stanville is a Californian nightmare amongst almond groves, established by agricultural corporations that use automated pest control and harvesting machinery. Gordon, who lives up in the hills (a bit like Kaczynski did), looks down on a mechanised landscape.
Having stayed in SF in various locations for a while myself in 1970, including in a dump on Baker Street – which then was a mainly black area and no-go zone for the cops – I can appreciate the low-down streets like Market Street where Romy and friends hang out and never really get out of: where the whole universe revolves around derelict carparks, cheap burger joints and seedy strip clubs like the Mars Room. Stanville is a world away by prison bus but when you get there it is exactly the same from where you came from: a very small world where nothing good happens. Even when the protagonists drive cars the best they can do is to cruise to Ocean Beach, not to admire sunsets but, at least in my experience, to pull into the parking lot, let the engine run, shoot Budweiser (!) sixpacks and get wasted on whatever drugs available and drive back to Market Street.
There is a bit of Americana Kushner seems to like when it comes to cars and bikes: Romy occasionally drives an Impala while others enthuse about Studebakers and the like. It is bit of a cliché that the good bad guy, Doc, rides his good ole Harley while the really bad bad guy (Kurt) rides his pathetic BMW K100.
Is there a correlation to Californian racism, spelled out as a hierarchy of white, black and Mexican for the Californian prison population and contempt for Asians who never do crime? While Romy was named by her German mother after Romy Schneider, a famous German actress, there is never any indication in the book that anybody ever has any racist opinion on this Teutonic matter. The only other hint is the inmate called Norse who is of course a trashy white supremacist.
Addendum:
As a real life sequel consider the recent pardon of Cyntoia Brown (as reported by the Guardian): as a 16-year old forced into prostitution she kills a customer in 2004 and is jailed for life. Now after some 15 years inside, she is released as an act of mercy by the departing governor of Tennessee:
“Cyntoia Brown committed, by her own admission, a horrific crime at the age of 16,” Haslam said in a statement. “Yet, imposing a life sentence on a juvenile that would require her to serve at least 51 years before even being eligible for parole consideration is too harsh, especially in light of the extraordinary steps Ms Brown has taken to rebuild her life.”
So what has she done to ‘rebuild her life’ while in jail? According to her own statement she is grateful to two lecturers from a university that enrolled her in a degree program that she has nearly finished – doing much better than Romy Hall under the guidance of Gordon Hauser in Kushner’s novel. Secondly and more importantly, as I see it, is her conversion to fundamentalist Christianity, praising the Lord for holding her hand. None of the protagonists in Kushner’s novel are ‘religious’ and none of them are sorry for what they have done, not because they lack empathy but because they lack insight. Cyntoia Brown is the exception to the rule by entering into a compact with the devil (or God, if you prefer) to appease the ruling class, for the only way to change from bad to good is by the grace of God (and a bit of university education). Criminal justice reform advocates are said to support the decision of the governor. Thank God, celebrities like the Kardashians are also on board. They all should read Rachel Kushner’s Mars Room so that they get to understand that state governors and politicians (and entertainment gods) in general are not the solution but the problem when it comes to Dostoyevsky’s conundrum in Crime and Punishment (also currently known as ‘law and order’ or ‘ten commandments’ in Western democracies like the USA).
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