Gritty prison lit but I couldn't put it down even when I wanted to. Superb writing, voice, characters. ( )

Last thoughts as I closed the book were “huh?”...as I proceeded to tear up. Did I understand the point to the book? No, but the ending was still incredibly sad to me. Everything was written very well. I love the characters, I love the storylines, but nothing connected. It was almost like this was a book of a few short stories but instead of reading one short story at a time, you read a little bit from each story in every other chapter. I kept waiting for it to “click“, for some connection to be made but that never happened. So I don’t want to give this book a bad score because overall I really enjoyed the stories, but I can’t give it a five because I don’t really understand the point to the book and that irritates me. ( )

Excellent ( )

The Mars Room is a hard-bitten prison novel. At the outset, Romy Hall is being transported to a high security prison to serve a life sentence for murder. Romy was an exotic dance at the Mars Room in San Francisco, but he life has been on a downslope since then.

In the prison, Romy meets Gordon Hauser, a teacher, who sees her academic potential and tries to encourage her, however Romy is more interested in what she can leverage from him. We also encounter Doc, a disgraced ex-cop serving hard time in another prison for doing a hit on behalf of one of Romy's cell-mates. Doc lives in fear of his past being made known to the other prisoners.

In telling their stories Kushner does not try to varnish any of her characters; they are all flawed human beings. The book is an engrossing read with plenty to say, but I'm not sure that I entirely got it. For example, I don't understand why Kushner included excerpts from the Unabomber's wilderness diary as some sort of counterpoint to Gordon's remote existence near the prison. I don't feel that added anything other than confusion to the novel. ( )

For me, this book ambled along in the three star realm until the ending where I felt it improved. I love when an author can take essentially bad characters and make them sympathetic (a la Lolita), and I thought Kushner did that to some degree throughout the book, but in a more masterful fashion when describing Romy’s stalker, Kurt. The characters were just generally plain interesting; I felt like I was introduced to people I would never know in real life.
My major knock on the book was with the plot. I didn’t mind the disjointedness as many characters were introduced and then put on the back burner, but I couldn’t help but think that the author’s in-depth research was just a little too in evidence. It read like non-fiction to me in so many ways. I love non-fiction, so I am fine with that, but I expect a different kind of narrative arc in a novel, and honestly, this book didn’t deliver. I can put down and pick up a non-fiction read with ease; and with this book, I felt the same way . . .and that’s not the quality of a great work of fiction.
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