The Mars Room

A masterful book about a tough subject.

Separated from her young son, Romy Hall is serving two consecutive life sentences for killing a customer from the Mars Room, a strip club where she’d been dancing. Brilliantly written with compassion and dry, dark humor, the book explores Romy’s relationships with her fellow prisoners and the despair, dangers, and absurdities of life behind bars.

I loved this novel’s gritty texture, its sentences, its characters, and how it forced me to think more deeply about why and how we incarcerate people. The final sequence in Muir Woods is heart-pounding, wondrous, devastating, and strangely… show more.

The Mars Room is the bar in San Francisco where Romy Hall used to give lap dances. It’s also the catalyst for the event that landed her in a high-security women’s prison serving two consecutive life sentences far away from her seven-year-old son. In addition to the sky-high stakes and Kushner’s incisive prose, what thrilled me about this novel is the way it’s told, on dual tracks. The present is Romy’s experience of incarceration, and the past is a slow reveal of everything that led up to her imprisonment. The tension mounts and mounts until finally we learn the circumstances… show more.

Rachel Kushner and I both live in Los Angeles. We have both written novels set in California. Hers is an impressive act of imagination as most of it takes place in a women’s prison. Although she has visited the Central California Women’s Facility a number of times and befriended an ex-inmate when researching the book, she has never been a prisoner herself. Yet the lives of the prisoners are utterly convincing, especially that of the major character, Romy, a prostitute sentenced to two life sentences for killing her stalker. I particularly admire the way that Kushner, in creating Romy as… show more.