1 5 0 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W A B I G A I L D E U T S C H The first line of dialogue in Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room is a plea for silence. A pregnant fifteen-year-old convict, ‘‘her belly so large they had to get an extra length of chain to shackle her hands to her sides,’’ can’t stop weeping during a long trip on a prison transport bus. At this infraction, a fellow inmate orders, ‘‘Shut the hell up!’’ The incident inspires our narrator – a former stripper named Romy Hall, serving two life sentences for murder – to recall an early prison lesson of her own. Just after her arrest, she cried hysterically until her cellmate delivered a fittingly soundless message : ‘‘She turned around and lifted her jail shirt to show me her low back tattoo, her tramp stamp. It said: ‘Shut the Fuck Up.’’’ This double emphasis is no accident; the jailed women of Kushner’s novel are shut up in more ways than one. With the exception of one character, the pointedly named Laura Lipp, ‘‘no one has ever introduced themselves to me by full name,’’ Romy notes, ‘‘or attempted to give any believable-seeming account of T h e M a r s R o o m : A N o v e l , by Rachel Kushner (Scribner, 352 pp., $27) 1 5 1 R who they are on a first introduction, and no one would, and I don’t, either.’’ Romy, whose imprisonment separated her from her young son, quiets herself internally, too, steering her thoughts away from the boy. Even as an employee at the titular strip club the Mars Room, she adopted a laconic strategy: ‘‘grinding was easier than talking.’’ But her most consequential silence came in court. Romy’s lawyer discouraged her from explaining her motives on the witness stand, and a judge ruled her victim’s behavior – a ‘‘sordid history’’ of stalking – inadmissible as evidence: ‘‘It did not establish an imminent threat on the night in question, and so the jury never learned a thing about it, not a single detail’’ that might have exonerated Romy. The Mars Room depicts that sordid history in full. For Kushner, everything is admissible – not just Romy’s state of mind but also her victim’s, and even the internal chatter of the girl whose tattoo instructed Romy to pipe down. The result is a fugue of a book whose various voices swell and fade, complementing and complicating Kushner’s themes. (This complexity recalls the interwoven narratives of The Flamethrowers, Kushner’s previous novel, which included tales of the New York City art world in the 1970s, an Italian motorcycle gang during World War I, and more.) The novel’s lack of straightforwardness – its tendency to toggle among perspectives and time periods – is precisely the point: the narrative winds and loops, confuses and complicates, because the truth is confusing and complicated, too. Similarly, the minds of Kushner’s characters tend to meander. And their freedom to think, to travel down fanciful mental byways , works in counterpoint to their confinement; that liberty (a silent one, naturally) is among the few they’ve hung on to. The very name Romy Hall, with its hints of both roaming outside and staying indoors, reinforces this duality. Even in prison, Romy manages to wander: she can imagine the view of the bay ‘‘like I was ghostwalking around the city. House by house, I looked at all there was to see, pressed my face to the breezeway gates of the Victorians along the eastern ridge of Buena Vista Park, the blue of the water softened by the faintest residue of fog.’’ Romy remembers the ‘‘clammy fingers of fog working their way into our clothes’’ and ‘‘the bad feeling of extra weight tugging me downward, from the 1 5 2 D E U T S C H Y mud caked on my jean hems.’’ Kushner’s elegiac passages about San Francisco are among the book’s most vivid, and their sharpness communicates how real the place remains to Romy, miles away in a...