(Book review of Rachel Kushner’s 2018 novel, The Mars Room, for Dissent Magazine.)

As part of my research job at the Vera Institute of Justice, I regularly visit jails and prisons. One summer, preparing for a trip to a women’s prison in the Midwest, I was looking at Google Maps while on a conference call with the warden when I saw something unusual. Someone had written HELP in enormous letters in the sand of the prison yard. Sitting in my office, I stared at this distress signal and wondered for whom the message was intended.

Millions of people are incarcerated in America, but we know relatively little about their daily lives. Correspondence to and from prisons—those contained cities—is censored, and rights to communicate and visit are very limited on all sides. For the most part, the state sets the narrative, and loved ones, journalists, litigators, and researchers get leftover bits of information. This leaves an opening for literature, one skillfully filled by Rachel Kushner’s new novel, The Mars Room, which is set mostly in a fictional women’s prison in California’s Central Valley. Reading it feels like peering through the razor wire.

continue reading. . .