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The mars room book review6/24/2023 The Mars Room further burnishes Kushner’s status as a writer of great topical versatility her two previous novels, Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers, are works of historical fiction, and they show her to be as competent a portraitist of revolutionary Cuba as of 1970’s Manhattan. One of the novel's many ambitions is to disclose, to render un-secret, the stories and experiences of incarcerated people-those whom many would gladly relegate to the “capsule” that Romy mentions-and thereby to provoke the kind of emotional response that Chain Night “shield the regular people” from. Anything to shield the regular people from having to look at us, a crew of cuffed and chained women on a sheriff’s department bus.”This incarcerated population’s treatment as an ugly secret is, Kushner suggests here and throughout the novel, part and parcel of why it continues to exist as such. “If they could have shot us to the prison in a capsule they would have. “They were moving us at that hour for a reason, for many reasons,” explains passenger Romy Leslie Hall, the book’s central character, herself serving “two consecutive life sentences plus six years” for murder. Rachel Kushner’s new novel, The Mars Room (Scribner), begins on Chain Night, when inmates are shuttled from one correctional facility to another.
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