6/22/2023 0 Comments The mars room rachel kushner![]() Much of the book is told in flashbacks to Hall’s prior life as a dancer in a seedy Tenderloin strip club called the Mars Room. The term conjures a dull social-realist slog with a vaguely redemptive ending suffice it to say that in this, as in many other ways, Kushner’s novel defeats easy preconceptions. ![]() ![]() The Mars Room is thus, at least nominally, a prison novel. 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. 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. ![]() With The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner cements her place as the most vital and interesting American novelist working today. ![]()
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