The Mars Room

Kushner profits at being able to describe humans and human action (and inaction) well. She's not sporadic nor hyperkinetic in the same style of writers such as Bukowski, but provides details in a kind of languid way. An example of this follows from her intro:

Chain Night happens once a week on Thursdays. Once a week the defining moment for sixty women takes place. For some of the sixty, that defining moment happens over and over. For them it is routine. For me it happened only once. I was woken at two a.m. and shackled and counted, Romy Leslie Hall, inmate W314159, and lined up with the others for an all-night ride up the valley. As our bus exited the jail perimeter, I glued myself to the mesh-reinforced window to try to see the world. There wasn’t much to look at. Underpasses and on-ramps, dark, deserted boulevards. No one was on the street. We were passing through a moment in the night so remote that traffic lights had ceased to go from green to red and merely blinked a constant yellow. Another car came alongside. It had no lights. It surged past the bus, a dark thing with demonic energy. There was a girl on my unit in county who got life for nothing but driving. She wasn’t the shooter, she would tell anyone who’d listen. She wasn’t the shooter. All she did was drive the car. That was it. They’d used license plate reader technology. They had it on video surveillance. What they had was an image of the car, at night, moving along a street, first with lights on, then with lights off. If the driver cuts the lights, that is premeditation. If the driver cuts the lights, it’s murder.

The story lulls on from there. An inmate is brought into prison; the reader knows this from the get-go, and learns of her past. Poverty, desperate rushes for resolutions, abuse, addiction, it's all here. In a sense, it's both the ire and stereotypical reactions of prison life contained in this book that makes it semi-good and, at its worst, not more than OK; I missed a lot of the solemnity that can occur in prison.

Still, this is Kushner's book, and it is OK. She writes very well, and that's what saved the book for me.

Kushner profits at being able to describe humans and human action (and inaction) well. She's not sporadic nor hyperkinetic in the same style of writers such as Bukowski, but provides details in a kind of languid way. An example of this follows from her intro:

Chain Night happens once a week on Thursdays. Once a week the defining moment for sixty women takes place. For some of the sixty, that defining moment happens over and over. For them it is routine. For me it happened only once. I was woken at two a.m. and shackled and counted, Romy Leslie Hall, inmate W314159, and lined up with the others for an all-night ride up the valley. As our bus exited the jail perimeter, I glued myself to the mesh-reinforced window to try to see the world. There wasn’t much to look at. Underpasses and on-ramps, dark, deserted boulevards. No one was on the street. We were passing through a moment in the night so remote that traffic lights had ceased to go from green to red and merely blinked a constant yellow. Another car came alongside. It had no lights. It surged past the bus, a dark thing with demonic energy. There was a girl on my unit in county who got life for nothing but driving. She wasn’t the shooter, she would tell anyone who’d listen. She wasn’t the shooter. All she did was drive the car. That was it. They’d used license plate reader technology. They had it on video surveillance. What they had was an image of the car, at night, moving along a street, first with lights on, then with lights off. If the driver cuts the lights, that is premeditation. If the driver cuts the lights, it’s murder.

The story lulls on from there. An inmate is brought into prison; the reader knows this from the get-go, and learns of her past. Poverty, desperate rushes for resolutions, abuse, addiction, it's all here. In a sense, it's both the ire and stereotypical reactions of prison life contained in this book that makes it semi-good and, at its worst, not more than OK; I missed a lot of the solemnity that can occur in prison.

Still, this is Kushner's book, and it is OK. She writes very well, and that's what saved the book for me.