Difficult though it may be to imagine a world without the need for prisons, the literature of incarceration issues from the human spirit’s chafing at the idea of confinement, its instinctive hatred for the apparatus of punishment. The best of it is by former prisoners themselves: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Henri Charrière’s Papillon, and Malcolm Braly’s On the Yard are indispensable accounts of how prison deforms the soul.
No less fascinating are those attempts by authors outside of the system to, in effect, do somebody else’s time. These acts of imaginative empathy—like John Cheever’s Falconer or even Stephen King’s pulpy novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption—are valuable in a different way, as explorations of fear and exercises in compassion. To walk a mile in another man’s shackles is one of the greatest challenges of art or life. In her third novel, The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner walks a razor’s edge between compassion and credulity to show us the truth. And the truth hurts.
Kushner’s convict is 29-year-old Romy Hall, a former stripper at San Francisco’s Mars Room who is, when we meet her, en route to serve two consecutive life sentences “plus six years” (injury, meet insult) for murdering her stalker. Romy’s voice is hard-boiled but betrays more vulnerability than she realizes. When she calls her customers “losers to be exploited but who believed they were exploiting us,” the reader may sense that this is, tragically, self-deception: When two people pick each other’s pockets, the loser is the one losing sleep over who came out ahead.
Romy, needless to say, never comes out ahead. Her loathsome stalker must die but once. She faces a living death in Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, made all the more horrific when her mother dies and her son, Jackson, becomes a ward of the state. She has no legal recourse even to learn his whereabouts. What she has is time, lots of it, in an environment seemingly engineered to induce madness. Yet of the torments so meticulously anatomized by Kushner—delousing, strip searches, inedible food, mind-numbing drugs, incompetent legal counsel, rules too numerous to learn or follow—the worst seems to be the corrupting presence of other prisoners.
“There was no cooperation,” Romy muses. “Just people eager to see others fall under the hammer they suffered under themselves.” In this respect, Kushner shows us, prison is not unlike the limbo of juvenile delinquency, substance abuse, and what is now tactfully called “sex work” whence Romy comes. The world available to Kushner’s women is perfectly Hobbesian, bellum omnium contra omnes, which perhaps is why Kushner named her strip club with a winking nod to the Roman god of war. “The Russian women,” Romy says, “when they started dancing at the Mars Room, brought a new post-Soviet ruthlessness.”
Bemoaning the intelligence-insulting signs she sees everywhere in Stanville, Romy says, “Plenty I have met in prison cannot read, and some cannot tell time, but that doesn’t mean they are not shrewd and superior individuals who can outsmart any egghead. . . . The imbecile the rules and signs are meant to address is nowhere to be found.” But far from being a definition of intelligence that many of us would recognize, this sounds like a hymn to the kind of manipulation, politicking, and predation that if they have not helped to land someone in prison, will certainly be refined to high art by the time he gets out.
Prison normalizes and rewards the worst in people. A person whose job on the outside was “exploiting losers” will have a competitive advantage behind bars. When Kushner shows us women callously grooming lonely men to leech off once paroled, we are faced with a discomfiting chicken/egg question. Did prison, society, or men make these women this way? Or did these women gravitate toward environments in which such “adaptations” have value? We are forever being invited to identify with and applaud survivors, and all prison stories are survival stories. Yet they offer us a chance to ask—survival at what cost? How much of myself am I willing to kill in order to live?
This brings us around to Kushner’s only serious failure of imagination. In parallel and also intersecting narratives, she shows us the experience of two men in the prison system. Gordon Hauser is an idealistic young teacher working at Stanville, who lives in a cabin and spends much of his time thinking about those famous cabin-dwellers Thoreau and Kaczynski. Rich “Doc” Richards, a corrupt cop serving time, is, like the most bestial of prisoners, incapable of seeing others as anything but means to an end.
If Gordon illustrates how compassion can stick a target on one’s back, Doc represents a more sinister warning: Power corrupts, and when it corrupts the already corrupt, look out. But what about the guards? In an astounding lapse, Kushner all but ignores their attitudes and inner lives, as if to say that of all the people involved in this system, they alone lack spirit or agency. They are shown as mere products of circumstance, either too poor or too stupid to get a different, better job. That their motivations and moral compromises should be treated with less curiosity or generosity than those of murderers and rapists may serve The Mars Room’s implicit social justice agenda, but it does not inspire confidence that Kushner quite understands why we have prisons in the first place.