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A Novel
by Rachel Kushner
Book Reviewed by:From twice National Book Award–nominated Rachel Kushner comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.
It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.
Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner's work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction "succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."
The Mars Room is clever, instructive, darkly funny, and unforgettable – a brilliant exploration of the gap between self-perception and societal judgment...continued
Full Review
(687 words)
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(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
In The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner provides excerpts from Ted Kaczynski's journals to draw parallels between the Unabomber and her character Gordon Hauser, the man that teaches an English class at Stanville Prison. Ted Kaczynski was a reclusive U.S. domestic terrorist responsible for mailing or planting 16 bombs from 1978-1995, killing three people and injuring 23. "Unabomber" was a moniker given to Kaczynski by the FBI during their investigation, standing for "University and Airline Bomber."
Kaczynski began his life as a remarkable genius, attending Harvard University for his undergraduate degree and earning a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan at age 25. He went on to teach at the University of California, Berkeley for ...
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It is a fact of life that any discourse...will always please if it is five minutes shorter than people expect
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