'The Mars Room' review: Rachel Kushner's new novel like a grim episode of 'Orange Is the New Black'

More than a week before the release of Rachel Kushner's new novel, "The Mars Room," The New York Times published an excerpt in a special 12-page section. Hauntingly illustrated and spiced with artsy pull-quotes, it was an extraordinary presentation designed to proclaim the advent of an extraordinary book. Indeed, a Times book critic followed up with a review calling "The Mars Room" "a major novel."

Which may be the problem with this bleak tale about people trapped in the American prison system. "The Mars Room" shuffles along shackled with so much Importance that it barely has room to move. Swollen with certainty, the story tolerates little ambiguity and offers few surprises. Kushner told The New Yorker that several years ago she decided "to learn everything I could about California prisons." And now she is determined to teach it to us, her readers, who are sentenced to more than 300 pages of despair, cruelty and illness.

The heroine is Romy Hall, a 29-year-old white woman who has just begun serving two consecutive life sentences plus six years for murdering a stalker. The mother of a little boy, Romy was a lap dancer at the Mars Room in San Francisco, "the worst and most notorious, the very seediest and most circuslike place there is. . . . 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."

Romy's new comrades at the Stanville women's prison in California include Button Sanchez, who gives birth while being admitted. Conan looks so masculine that she was once accidentally housed in a prison for men. Betty LaFrance had been a leg model for Hanes pantyhose but now makes her own hooch from juice and ketchup. "Don't forget to decant," she advises. "It's got to breathe."

If you've seen a few episodes of "Orange Is the New Black," you'll recognize the structure here. Romy has no chance of getting out, but she's frantic to make some kind of contact with her little boy, a struggle that provides a faint overarching storyline. Constrained by the prison setting, the plot mostly relies on shifts in focus and point of view to create movement.

Kushner cycles through the women's tragic stories, mingling horrific anecdotes from before they were incarcerated with grim events in prison. They are almost all early victims of rape, often by a family member; they inevitably fall into addiction; they have few opportunities beyond sex work; they are abused by boyfriends, employers and police officers. The legal system fails to protect them and then fails to adjudicate their crimes with understanding or compassion.

These are undeniably heartbreaking stories that reflect the actual, dreadful experiences of millions of people caught in America's poverty-and-prison industry, a machine greased by our inane drug laws. But there's something so calculated about "The Mars Room" that even the most progressive readers are bound to feel like they're being marched down a narrow hallway. I never felt those heavy paws in Kushner's previous, far more dynamic novels, "Telex From Cuba" and "The Flamethrowers," both of which were finalists for a National Book Award.

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Ironically, "The Mars Room" is best in its minor incidents. A weird little chapter about Richard Nixon in Opryland, for instance, is darkly comic and unsettling. And in the novel's surprisingly poetic ending, Romy finally experiences a kind of insight beyond her capacity to articulate. In these rare spaces, we're allowed the freedom to choose how we feel, to escape this novel's thematic bars and experience something closer to art than instruction.