The Harsh Beauty of Rachel Kushner’s ‘The Mars Room’
With The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner cements her place as the most vital and interesting American novelist working today. A brutal, unforgiving, and often grimly funny tour de force of wasted lives, The Mars Room makes most other contemporary fiction seem timid and predictable; in doing so, it reminds us that fiction that startles and abrades is as necessary, or even more necessary, than fiction that comforts and assuages.
The anti-hero of Kushner’s novel is Romy Hall, a feral Californian lost girl who, as the novel begins, is on her way to a maximum-security women’s prison to serve a life sentence for murder. is thus, at least nominally, a prison novel. The term conjures a dull social-realist slog with a vaguely redemptive ending; suffice
