Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room is the kind of novel that makes you angry at a system and heartbroken for a person at the same time, and it does this without ever once asking for your pity.
I started this one on a Saturday morning walk along the lakefront with Denise. By the third chapter, the joggers and the sailboats felt obscene. There's a moment early on — Romy Hall is on a bus, shackled, being transported to Stanville Women's Correctional Facility — and Kushner describes the Central Valley landscape rolling past with this flat, almost affectless precision that made me stop walking. Just stood there on the path like a weirdo while a cyclist shouted at me. The prose deserves to be savored, and Kushner's own voice delivering those opening pages sets a tone that's less "dramatic reading" and more "someone telling you about the worst thing that happened to them while staring at a wall."
The Author Who Reads Like She's Confessing
Here's the thing about author-narrated fiction: it can go very right or very wrong, and The Mars Room lands somewhere genuinely interesting in between. Kushner reads with this unhurried, slightly detached cadence that — I'll be honest — took me about forty minutes to settle into. She doesn't do voices. Not really. Romy sounds like Kushner. The other inmates sound like Kushner. The guards, the lawyers, the tangential characters who drift in and out — all Kushner. And yes, there were stretches where I had to rewind because I'd lost track of who was speaking.
But here's what I kept coming back to: that flatness is the point. Romy isn't performing her trauma. She's recounting it with the kind of emotional economy that people develop when they've been forced to tell their story to parole boards and public defenders so many times that the feeling has been sanded down to bare fact. Kushner's narration captures that. The remorse is there — you hear it in these tiny pauses, these slight catches in her voice when Romy thinks about her son Jackson — but it never tips into melodrama. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation.
A professional voice actor might have given you clearer character separation. Might have given the inmates distinct accents and cadences. But I think something would've been lost. This book isn't really an ensemble piece, even when it feels like one. It's Romy's consciousness, and everyone else exists inside it.
San Francisco as a Ghost and the Prison as the Only Real Place
Kushner does something structurally that I found both brilliant and, at times, frustrating. The narrative doesn't stay inside Stanville. It jumps — to Romy's past in San Francisco, to the Mars Room (a strip club where she worked), to the story of her stalker, to these strange philosophical tangents about Ted Kaczynski and the nature of freedom. There's a character, a teacher at the prison, who reads Thoreau and seems to exist partly as Kushner's way of interrogating a certain kind of liberal complicity.
Some of these threads land hard. The San Francisco sections — Romy's pre-incarceration life, the gritty specificity of the Tenderloin and the Mission in the late '90s — feel lived-in and particular. This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing one true sentence: Kushner stacks true sentences about a city that's already disappeared under its own gentrification, and the effect is elegiac without being sentimental.
Other threads? They meander. The Kaczynski passages and some of the institutional satire — the deadpan absurdities of prison bureaucracy — are sharp in small doses but occasionally pulled me out of Romy's story right when I wanted to stay close to her. At 10 and a half hours, the pacing asks for patience. This is not a book you throw on while grading freshman essays at 11 PM. (I tried. I missed an entire subplot about a corrupt guard and had to go back.)
Who Should Lean In — and Who Should Walk Away
If you loved Orange Is the New Black but wished it were angrier and less interested in making you comfortable, this is its spiritual successor in novel form. If you read Joan Didion on California and thought "yes, but where are the women who actually got destroyed by this place," Kushner has your answer.
But if you need strong vocal differentiation between characters in your audiobooks — if losing track of who's talking pulls you out completely — you might want to read the print edition instead. That's not a knock on Kushner's narration. It's an honest assessment of the format's limitation here.
My students would hate this. I love it. Not because it's fun — it's bleak as anything I've listened to this year — but because Kushner trusts you to sit with discomfort and draw your own conclusions about who deserves mercy and who gets it in America.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
This is a book that earns its anger. It doesn't preach. It shows you a woman serving two consecutive life sentences for a crime born out of desperation, and it dares you to look away. Kushner reading her own words gives the whole thing a documentary quality — raw, unpolished, uncomfortably intimate. Not a flawless audiobook experience, but a powerful one. The kind you finish and then just sit in your car for a minute, staring at nothing.
