“[…] but the rhythms of the world did not always coordinate with the rhythms of the person”
Rachel Kushner
The opening I had briefly sketched out to this post was going to go something like: this book took me so long to read, it was a drag, I’m losing the pace of enthused reading that I once had, etc. In reality it took me twelve days to finish The Mars Room. Twelve days isn’t much for many and can fly by, but for me this near-fortnight has been a particularly laboured one and the truth is that it has felt an age since I started reading the book. When I try to think of what I was doing twelve days ago – how I felt, what plans I had, I feel a headache coming on. Each day somehow manages to drag its heels, paralysing me in the newest worry of the day and an overwhelming gloom, or zip through to that dreaded hour – six o’clock – when life begins to wind down and everyone can relax except me. A look at my calendar has just told me that on the 26th June I had my most recent meeting with my counsellor (the details of which I can’t really remember apart from something about living a rich, satisfying life), and a couple of days before I went to see Tame Impala play. Ah yes – some crying was done that week. Tomorrow is my last session with my counsellor and I’m not sure what is working, whether I feel any different, whether I believe in the whole ‘acceptance’ of anxiety thing. I’m sure I don’t need to tell sufferers how excruciating it is to just ‘sit’ during an anxiety or panic attack – how the notion of letting it ‘wash over’ you is completely absurd when everything in your body is shouting RUN!! DO SOMETHING!! HELP!!
Anyway, The Mars Room. Reading Rachel Kushner’s most recent novel has been interspersed with the blossoming of a new – or rather, revived – anxiety symptom, that of the chest pain and surely, imminent heart attack and death. It came to a head two Sundays ago when I found myself on the 111 website for information on what to do when you have a crushing weight on your chest that makes it uncomfortable to breathe, together with twinges in your heart every time it beats. Before I could get that far, the first page:
Call 999 now if you have:
- signs of a heart attack – pain like a very tight band, heavy weight or squeezing in the centre of your chest
Good, isn’t it! So that was me convinced that my time was up. Except it wasn’t, never is, and the panic and feeling dragged on all night and left me with what I can only describe as an anxiety hangover for the next two days, feeling shitty and tired and scared. Like the protagonist of The Mars Room, Romy Hall, my gloom dragged on – felt like a life sentence of pessimism and worry. Yet hers doesn’t exist in the imagined-threat world of anxiety, her forever-time is contained within in the bitingly real walls of Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility in California, where she is serving two consecutive life sentences for killing her stalker. Kushner’s story is an unflinching depiction of what it means to be poor, female, and targeted in modern-day America. It’s urgent, uncomfortable and humming with voices usually silenced – see Conan London, a trans woman who is one of a small group to protect Serenity Smith, a black trans woman who is transferred to Stanville and the victim of planned attacks.
But for all its vivid realism, dark comedy and character development, I just wasn’t into The Mars Room. Maybe, at a time when I’m looking to escape into some sort of neat, satisfying plot, The Mars Room‘s confusing blend of timelines, voices and narratives was hard to follow. That’s me looking for some kind of unreality, though. I should read Lord of the Rings, or something. The Mars Room, instead, brings home that life is shitty. And it’s much shittier for the poor, abused, oppressed characters in Kushner’s novel than it is for someone like me. Where did I expect a life sentence to go? A climactic escape, Hall’s joyous reunion with her son, and a happy ending? If I distance myself from the book more though, it’s true that the plot meanders round in circles with dead ends, that someone couldn’t be blamed for perhaps thinking they might go somewhere. Hauser, Serenity Smith, Kurt Kennedy, even the death of the protagonist’s mother all lead back to the grim nothing-ness of her life sentence. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to do, no opportunity to grow.
Probably because of the recent buzz of the final series of Orange is the New Black, but I felt the book was just too indebted to the characters of the series. Obviously, parallels are going to be made between two narratives of the harsh realities of a women’s prison, but I felt less of the shock-value of how to make hooch or a shiv or how to escape or flush things up and down the toilet. I’d learned inside Litchfield Penitentiary. Some parts of Kushner’s novel just didn’t work for me – the diary extracts from Thoreau and Kaczynski came across as pretentious and unmatched, jarring with contemporary realities at play in The Mars Room. They hardly seemed to serve much purpose other than fleshing out the Gordon Hauser character who, as mentioned, amounts to nothing. I didn’t care about him when it became clear that of course, he can’t help Romy. And I didn’t much care for the story of Doc, the ex-lover of Betty LaFrance and dirty cop who for some reason has a few chapters to sell some sort of story of redemption, the horror at his near-death. He’s something straight from Sin City, urging his toxic masculinity into Romy’s narrative, catalysed by a stalker who thought he was ‘protecting’ her.
So what drives the plot? Nothing, it seems. At first it might be the change of the new prison – the story opens as Romy’s being transferred – but nothing happens directly to our narrator, she only witnesses a young inmate give birth and have her baby snatched away. Time passes and little changes; Romy spends some time in ad-seg and we hear Betty LaFrance’s story, whether we want to or not. But Romy doesn’t change or grow, things only get gradually worse until it’s four years since she last saw her son who is now somewhere in the foster system. It was 100 pages until the end before I was happily turning pages, and even then so much of The Mars Room need not be there at all. There’s an oddly-placed bit of star-gazing and nature-appreciation right at the end – the great American frontier myth being exploded by the whirr of the police helicopter and the intrusive floodlights of a search party. Romy’s story isn’t going anywhere, was never going to go anywhere right from the beginning, and one is naïve to think otherwise.
I give The Mars Room 2/5 today, but on another, more positive day or in more optimistic months it might’ve been different. I don’t think I’m completely wrong, though. It might fly in the face of the glowing reviews and awards but I still think there’s something distinctly lacking at the heart of the 335-page book.
hbiswriting 