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| Author Rachel Kushner |
Rachel Kushner is one of those writers who grab you at once
or confound you. Or both. In this, her fourth novel, she grabs you by the
shoulders, and then by the throat, and holds you despite, or because of, the subject
matter: women in prison.
The novel deals largely with how they got there and how they
survive, told in short takes between past and present. Kushner does not gloss over
a thing. I suspect the attention to detail is as scrupulous and intense a portrait
of prison life as written by an outsider. And, beyond all that, page-turner fiction.
We meet the narrator, Romy, on the overnight journey to
prison. She has been sentenced to long sequential terms for the murder of her
stalker. She cannot see beyond the end of the tunnel.
They were moving us at
that hour for a reason, for many reasons. If they could have shot us to the
prison in a capsule, they would have. Anything to shield the regular people
from having to look at us…
The title, by the way, refers to a seedy strip club in San
Francisco where Romy gave lap dances and where she rose above her coworkers, until
she got into trouble.
If you’d showered you
had a competitive edge at the Mars Room. If your tattoos weren’t misspelled you
were hot property. If you weren’t five or six months pregnant, you were the
it-girl in the club that night.
Her descriptions of the city by the bay are elegant and detailed,
and a harsh contrast to its currently high-tech persona. She has had to leave
her son behind with her mother, a ne’er-do-well herself with whom Romy has had
a tumultuous relationship, and the shadows of the mother-daughter and the
mother-son bond hovers over the story.
Kushner doesn’t ask you to feel sorry for Romy or any of the
other memorable characters. Nor does she expect you to them. This is not a victim
narrative. She merely tells their stories. You will alternately shield your
eyes or, yes, cry for them. More often you may marvel at the atrocities that
result from the inequities that pervade American culture, on display and
intricately woven through the lives of these prisoners. And their captors.
My only critique is that Romy’s remarkable perception and
insight seems the voice of a well-educated erudite person, and does not fit this
character. Still, you put that out of your mind in favor of the narrative and
the wisdom.
Did you ever notice
that women can seem common while men never do? You won’t ever hear anyone
describe a man’s appearance as common. The common man means the average man, a
typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A
woman who looks cheap doesn’t have to be respected, and so she has a cheap
value, a certain cheap value.
This is prison, beyond cliché or reality television. About inmates, and also the bystanders, the
opportunists, in and out of prison, and those who might offer redemption. Like a
Russian novel with all its drama and passions. A very good read.
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