The Mars Room

"Shortlist"

"This is a novel set in a part of modern life unfamiliar to most of us: a women’s prison. Of course, most of the characters in a women’s prison are going to be women. There are a few men important to the plot, including the one that the main character, 29 year-old single mother Romy Hall, is in prison for killing. Romy is an interesting character. She’s been a sex worker. She’s had problems (and pleasures) with drugs. She’s had abusive relations with men. But she’s quite thoughtful and intellectually sophisticated, though not in a way inconsistent with realism—with thinking that someone in her circumstances might actually think those thoughts. Sometimes, when a highly educated author writes about a character who, say, hasn’t been to college, the writer can put things in the character’s mouth that lead the reader to think, ‘Well, that’s you —that couldn’t be her.’ I didn’t ever feel that with this novel. She’s a well-made character who speaks in a plausible voice, who knows the sort of things that someone in her circumstances would know. “This novel is the one that made me feel I should go out and do something—that I should vote for prison reform” Like the other novels on the list, Kushner’s writing here is distinctive, stylish and well-executed. There are two important trans characters in this novel, too. That theme probably says something about our time: we’ve been thinking about these issues, and what we think about shows up in the novels we read. But, again, they’re not there in order to make a point, or to bludgeon us into thinking about an issue. Of all the books, this novel is the one that made me feel I should go out and do something—that I should vote for prison reform. Yes. But that only works if you don’t feel you’re being manipulated, and with Kushner, you don’t. The world itself has to work, and in The Mars Room , it does. I don’t know anything about women’s prisons, so I couldn’t speak to the reality of it, but it feels very plausible—and worrying—that that’s how it is. It is. In the novels we’ve talked about so far, there’s some element of facing up to pain and the dark side of life. To make people want to read a book like that, you have to pull something off, because it’s just unrelenting misery."