![]() Nobody in it zooms anywhere, although a powerful undertow pulls the reader through the book. By contrast, The Mars Room is sorrowful and laconic. Its narrator, Reno, sets a motorcycle speed record, hangs out in the Manhattan art world of the 1970s, and ends up in Italy, fraternizing with the Red Brigades. Kushner’s previous novel, The Flamethrowers, had a swagger to it. “We were all hopeful things would go differently. ![]() “I was assigned a public defender,” she remarks when describing her trial. Romy’s preoccupation with the way chance events divert (or preordain?) the course of a life gives the novel a terse, fatalistic, noirish flavor. ![]() But Romy is the unifying sensibility of The Mars Room, and hers is a stoic outlook, except when bad news reaches her about her son. (The inmates of Stanville are equally enthusiastic about a novel set in a women’s prison by Danielle Steele, so much so that they tear the paperback into sections so that more than one woman can read it at once.) Other chapters open up the perspectives of Romy’s cellie, Fernandez of Doc, a former dirty cop now serving time for helping to arrange a hit on his girlfriend’s husband even of Kennedy himself, Romy’s tormentor and victim. ![]() Some chapters come through the eyes of Gordon Hauser, a lonely Berkeley grad student–turned–prison GED instructor who befriends Romy and brings her books by Charles Bukowski and Denis Johnson, great chroniclers of the lowlife. ![]() Not all of the novel is told from Romy’s perspective. ![]()
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