Рейчел Кушнер - The Mars Room

Yes I think I’m special. That’s on account of me being myself. I have no one else to regard except Jackson, who I regard. Believe me. They called him Güero but he wasn’t a blond. They called him Güero because they loved him. They didn’t love me and they didn’t have to. There was no need for it. They loved him, and I loved him.

The damp from fog, like now, it’s inside me. I’m safe from it. Doesn’t even make me shiver. That kind of cold forms the deepest layer of my memories, from growing up there, treeless streets built on sand and the bad ocean, the broken bottle ocean with its big curve of concrete wall. Fatal Drownings Occur Here, the signs said on each stairwell down. Stairway to bonfire, to spray paint, to fistfight. Grandma’s closet at the beach was any car. Or behind a car. Or depending on the wind, in those stairwells. Fatal drownings occur here.

We swam in our clothes. We never once worried about drowning. Death was not in our future. No person lives in the future. The present, the present, the present. Life keeps on being that.

Hall, we have you surrounded.

They were talking to me. Sounded like yard orders.

Telling me to rejoice that Jackson was not here. That life does not go off the rails because it is the rails, goes where it goes.

Barking of dogs. Closer now.

Lights bathed the forest, everything bright as day.

Hands up, they said. Step out slowly with your hands where we can see them.

If Jackson were here, I could not protect him. He is safe from this.

I emerged from the tree and turned into the light, not slow. I ran toward them, toward the light.

He is on his path as I am on mine. The world has gone on for a long, long time.

I gave him life. It is quite a lot to give. It is the opposite of nothing. And the opposite of nothing is not something . It is everything.

For her wisdom and expertise on the visible and invisible net of the penal zone of the world—and for the thousands of other things she miraculously knows—I am grateful to Theresa Booboo Martinez.

I thank Mychal Concepción, Hakim, Tracy Jones, Elizabeth Lozano, Christy Clinton Phillips, and Michele Rene Scott for everything I’ve learned from them. Thanks also to Ayelet Waldman; Molly Kovel; Joanna Neborsky; Maya Andrea Gonzalez; Amanda Scheper; Justice Now of Oakland, California; and Paul and Lori Sutton.

I thank Susan Golomb for so many kinds of incredible support, and Nan Graham for her belief in me and for her crucial and unerring editorial guidance on this novel.

I thank Michal Shavit and Ana Fletcher for editorial input, as well as Don DeLillo, Joshua Ferris, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Emily Goldman, Mitch Kamin, Remy Kushner, Knight Landesman, Zachary Lazar, Ben Lerner, James Lickwar, Cynthia Mitchell, Marisa Silver, Dana Spiotta, and most of all, Jason Smith, for what feels like an endless supply of intellectual generosity.

I thank Emily for bearing witness in multiple ways.

Thanks to Susan Moldow, Katie Monaghan, Tamar McCollom, Daniel Loedel, and everyone at Scribner.

James Benning’s Two Cabins project and his film Stemple Pass directly inspired my thinking on Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski. I thank James for his friendship and his help, his willingness to engage in extensive dialogues over the past several years, and for the use of his Ted diaries.

The Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Civitella Ranieri each provided vital support while I wrote this book.

This reading group guide for The Mars Room includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

From twice National Book Award–nominated Rachel Kushner comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision. Unflinching, electric, and deeply empathetic, The Mars Room is a masterful meditation on what in people is breakable, what is unbreakable, as well as the existential meanings of class, and criminality, and the impossibility of forgiveness in our prison system.

1. At the beginning of the book, before she is incarcerated, Romy Hall, the central protagonist of The Mars Room , says, “I said everything was fine but nothing was. The life was being sucked out of me. The problem was not moral. It had nothing to do with morality. These men dimmed my glow. Made me numb to touch, and angry” ( page 26). What role do morality and virtue play in the telling of Romy’s story? Does morality factor into who is judged guilty and who is judged innocent?

2. The San Francisco depicted in this book is perhaps not a classic one of, as Romy puts it, “rainbow flags or Beat poetry or steep crooked streets,” but “fog and Irish bars and liquor stores all the way to the Great Highway” ( page 33). Was the San Francisco depicted in the novel a surprise to you? What significance do you read into the scene with the “Scummerz” and the young boy making noodles on the stove? Why is everyone from her past and all her memories so remote and vanished? Is this the nature of childhood and the erasure of cities, or something else more complicated and individual to do with Romy?

3. The overwhelming majority of people, and certainly middle-class people, will never spend a single day of their lives in jails and prisons. Should those who don’t have that dark destiny worry for those who do? What impression do you have, after reading The Mars Room , about individual agency, and who goes to prison in this country and who doesn’t?

4. “Sammy was my big sister and I was Button’s, and Conan was something like the dad. We had a family” ( page 241). In order to cope with their difficult surroundings the women of Stanville create familial bonds with each other. Do these women nurture one another or is their “family” more of an alliance of protection? What are the benefits of a “family” arrangement? The risks?

5. After recounting an emotional story from childhood, Conan says, “There are some good people out there … some really good people” ( page 252). Discuss the acts of generosity in this novel. Which ones stand out? These women seem to start at disadvantages. They take wrong turns. The prison system lacks mercy or a shot at redemption. Would many of these characters’ lives have been different with more, or greater, acts of generosity?

6. Straining the edges of a reader’s compassion perhaps is the character Doc, the “dirty cop” who had been involved with Betty LaFrance and is eventually strangled by his cellmate. Why do you think Kushner included him and his story in the book? Does he achieve a kind of unexpected likability, and if so, how?